A couple of weeks ago, the Miami Herald announced that Al Gore would not have picked up enough votes in Dade County to win the Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election. Of course, the Herald is still counting votes in 66 more counties, so that report should go in the "incomplete" file. A couple days ago, the Palm Beach Post reported that if the "dimpled chad" method of counting had been used, then Gore would have topped George W. Bush by enough votes to claim Florida and thus the White House.

The thing is, Gore still lost. It doesn't matter if it turns out that Jeb Bush himself stood on a corner in Tallahassee on election day and told all the black folks he saw that he personally had stripped them of their rights to vote. Gore still lost. It doesn't matter if it turns out that Republican elections officials in the panhandle "forgot" to tally the votes from certain precincts. Gore still lost. Period. End of story.

Not that I'm against these investigations into the votes. I'm as curious as the next guy to see what might have happened if the elections people in Florida happened to be competent (I'll leave any allegations of seriously crooked behavior to folks in the know--say, Lucy Morgan of the St. Pete Times or Carl Hiassen of the Herald). But theFlorida pols were anything but competent. And since the legislature and governor's mansion are held by Republicans, it's hard to imagine that things will get much better before the 2002 elections, much less the 2004 presidential election.

Like I said, though, it doesn't matter if Gore "really" won the election. Because, "really," he lost. George W. Bush is sitting in the White House, and day by day, he's making the best case possible for a Democratic return to power. His penchant for malapropism makes his father's tortured syntax sound like a Shakespearan speech. This bizarre rush-to-judgement on a tax cut isn't exactly winning converts to the overall Bush agenda, and once Republican moderates in the Senate get a hold of that bill, sparks will fly. He's gonna have bipartisan issues within his own party.

And that's before we get to matters of consequence. Bush wants to revamp the military. This entails getting rid of old weapons systems, shuttering a few more military bases and generally clamping down on a sizable chunk of the pork line. I'm with him all the way on this one. The missile defense system is a dubious enterprise, but the idea of streamlining the military and making it a leaner and more flexible force is a great one. Problem is, closing even one base will induce wretched screams of horror from the city, county and state involved. Because most of these bases are out in rural and semi-rural areas (the Bush parts of the electoral map), he'll be alienating one of his most vocal and demonstrative support groups. Think he can really accomplish such a daunting task after burning all his political capital on the tax cut? Or put another way, do you think he can do this if Dick Cheney keeps stopping off at the hospital for a "tune-up?"

No, Bush is going to have to prove that he can do everything he promised during the election ("be a uniter, not a divider" and all that claptrap). That or he must reach some sort of accord with the American people. The reason he and his pals have been talking up a heavy-duty recession that isn't (not quite, anyway) is so that he can claim he "fixed" said recession with his tax cut. He's following the Clinton script here. By all accounts, the economy started to climb out of recession a month or two before the 1992 election. Clinton's "economic rescue package" didn't really do much. But folks associated Clinton with good times (there is some justification on that score, at least over his entire eight years in office), and so Bush similarly wants to be seen as a savior.

Problem is, he's a mush-mouthed, weaselly-looking kinda guy. I'm sure he's big fun at all the Yale reunions, but average folks just don't buy into the notion that our current president is a "regular guy." He's a rich kid who bought his way to the governorship of Texas and then the White House. We all know it. Half the voters on election day held their noses and cast votes. The election was a tie. Bush won, by methods fair and foul, and so he sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and signs bills in the presidential manner (one letter at a time--more pens to hand out that way). Even his supporters say his greatest strength is the cadre of family friends he put into important jobs. George W. Bush is not a man called to greatness. He's the kind of president we get when our country is rolling along smoothly and can't be bothered by something as trivial as an election.

Maybe he won. Maybe Gore won. I guess someday we'll have even more competing tallies to argue about. Just don't say that Al Gore "really" won. He "really" lost. And that's about all there is to say about that.

Jon Worley is heartened by the first few days of the Bush presidency. He sees plenty of column fodder sprouting forth.