Any fair-minded person watching TV in the first two days after the abortive election should have frankly acknowledged that it was the Democrats who first took the low road of mob hysteria and backstage manipulation in Florida. The Republicans countered with an arrogant, presumptuous war mode of their own, but the initial destruction of civility and dignity was not of their making. As a registered Democrat and disillusioned former supporter of Bill Clinton, I voted for Ralph Nader as a protest against the corruption of my party -- which was abundantly on display among amoral Democratic operatives this past month.

A national election this close, with the presidency hanging in the balance, certainly demanded extraordinary postmortem measures. But Gore compromised his credibility from the start by demanding recounts only in heavily Democratic counties that he had already won in a landslide. Many citizens (like myself) would have strongly supported statewide manual recounts, however cumbersome, so that all Florida voters were treated equitably. Gore's divide-and-conquer strategy looked like vintage, ward-heeling dirty tricks.

Republicans correctly warned that manual recounts are not entirely reliable because they are subjective (is a "dimpled chad" really a vote?), introduce human error and open the door to "mischief" (i.e., tampering and fraud). Punch-card ballots were never designed for repeated handling or twisting (witness the snowfall of chad to the floor). Hence it's unlikely we can confidently trust future vote totals accumulated by sleuths of either party operating under the Freedom of Information Act.

The sanctimony and distortions of fact in Gore's Nov. 27 address to the nation were so flagrant that they seriously undercut any claim he might make to the next presidential nomination in 2004. On the other hand, the embarrassing, monthlong spectacle of George W. Bush dodging public view and choking on the simplest English sentences exposes yet again the astonishingly poor judgment of the Republican Party establishment that settled on him as the anointed nominee in the first place.

There are over a dozen competent, articulate, knowledgeable Republican governors and senators whose political talents leave Bush in the dust and who would probably have beaten Gore in a walk. But party elders, belatedly realizing that laconic, mummiform Bob Dole had been far too worn and jaded to send up against the loquacious, bouncily philandering Clinton in 1996, went for superficial glamour with Bush. Michigan's Gov. John Engler admitted as much on a talk show a year ago when he genially joked about why Bush was chosen rather than him: "I'm not as purty as he is."

So it looks likely that the U.S. will be stuck with a chief executive who will be scrambling to keep up with the job from Day 1. It's both dreary and unsettling that the nation's backup quarterback (the smart but shambling Dick Cheney) is so clearly past his prime and is playing Russian roulette with a heart condition to boot. But Bush is an unpretentious fellow with centrist instincts who may surprise people -- particularly if he gets his administration off to a terrific start by naming Colin Powell for secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor, who would be the most high-ranking African-Americans in history.

The behavior of the Northeastern major media during the Florida fiasco was shockingly biased. From my perspective as a professor of humanities and media studies, the covert power presently wielded by partisan liberal journalists has become positively alarming, partly because of other changes in communications. Over the past 30 years, daily newspapers have waned in number and variety; the weekly newsmagazines have declined in quality; primary education has weakened in history and geography; and higher education has been suffused with social-welfare ideology.

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