Legal, political jousting goes on

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, NOV. 27. From now on and for at least another week or so, it is a three- way battle for the White House - the political, the legal and the public relations front. And it is left to both the Bush and the Gore campaigns to craft a set of strategies that pays off both in the short and long terms. Amid all this, there is also the hope that the U.S. Supreme Court comes up with something definitive when it has finished hearing the two sides this Friday.

But the question that remains is after all the hoopla over the last three weeks, has the environment been so poisoned that whoever emerges as the 43rd President will just be limping along for the next four years? And in the meantime the Republicans and the Democrats brace themselves for the off year Congressional elections of 2002.

The answers to these questions will be as partisan as Washington D.C. is, or for that matter what Tallahassee, Florida has been in the last few days. Both the Vice-President, Mr. Al Gore, and the Texas Governor, Mr. Bush, have been talking about ``uniting'' the country but the rancour and the pot shots of the last few weeks clearly raises larger questions.

The first poll of post-election certification by the Florida Secretary of State, Ms. Katherine Harris, is quite revealing. A Washington Post/ABC News Poll taken on Sunday night is showing that 60 per cent of those surveyed said that Mr. Gore should concede the election now that Mr. Bush had been certified. And 56 per cent opined that they were confident that the Florida vote count was accurate.

That is precisely one of the challenges of both the campaigns - to the Gore team it is one of moulding public opinion making the point that he ``really'' won the national election and also Florida, if only the votes here were counted properly. And this is why the legal battles have to continue. In fact, Mr. Gore himself is expected to talk on this sometime on Monday. Both campaigns are trying to address the issue of who `stole' this election from whom.

The Bush campaign has already set its public relations exercise going. One of the first things that the former Secretary of State, Mr. James Baker, said in Florida was that the lawyers ``must go home''. This is clearly tapping into a sensitive area of public thinking that trial lawyers - at the bidding of the Democrats - are running amok; and are keen on stretching this out. And Mr. Bush made his point when in his nationally televised address argued that Mr. Gore's persistence on the legal front was not ``the best route for America''. And the impression of getting ready with the transition team headed by Mr. Richard Cheney is also for public relations.

The legal maze in Florida is all too well known and it gets off with a bang in Leon County this morning. The Gore campaign is set to challenge not just the stopping of counting in Miami-Dade which it says was because of intimidation from Republicans but also the fashion in which votes were counted in Palm Beach and Nassau. The Bush camp says that while this is not the preferred way, it will meet it aggressively.

A lot of attention is going to be on the political front as well - that is in how effectively Republican and Democratic law-makers are going to rally behind the major candidates. And to a large extent the focus is on top Democratic law-makers and their support to Mr. Gore. As it is, the Senate Minority Leader, Mr. Tom Daschle, and the House Minority Leader, Mr. Richard Gephardt, are travelling to Florida today on behalf of Mr. Gore.

The political momentum will, to a large extent, be determined by what Americans feel. If the perception persists that Mr. Bush has come out on top after several counts and that Mr. Gore should concede, Democratic law-makers will be less inclined to go against popular sentiment. Or at least this is what the Bush campaign hopes. As it is, an argument has been made repeatedly that politically it would be better for Mr. Gore to move aside and position himself better for 2004. In the process, Democrats may also stand to gain in 2002.

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