Now the Herald reports that the narrow recount ordered by Florida's high court almost certainly would have confirmed Bush's victory. So it was the Scalia-led decision to stop the count -- which drew a sharp, sorrowful dissent from Justice John Paul Stevens, and howls from legal scholars throughout the country -- that cast the darkest "cloud" over Bush's legitimacy, while also tarnishing the image of the Supreme Court.

Whether or not you favored Bush in November, after the Herald's audit, it has to be hard to think Scalia's reasons for stopping the recount were correct, and didn't ultimately ensure that the outcome of the election would forever be in partisan dispute. With the Supreme Court's final 5-4 decision Dec. 12, many Americans had their worst cynicism confirmed, seeing persuasive evidence that the only votes that mattered in Election 2000 were the five cast by Scalia and his Republican colleagues on the court.

The Bush presidency has suffered too. Insecurity about his lack of a mandate -- his anti-mandate, some might say, since he lost the popular vote by more than half a million -- has led the new president to jump out of the gate aggressively, even recklessly, hoping he could gain some quick legislative and policy victories that would give him the political momentum his contested election did not. (Of course, that good old Bush sense of entitlement also means arrogance comes naturally.)

His XFL approach to Democrats in Congress might be defensible, but he's been just as obstreperous toward Republican rivals like Sen. John McCain, and even international allies, who are puzzled by his hard-line, go-it-alone approach to the Kyoto climate change protocols, national missile defense, now-dead negotiations with North Korea and the Russian spy case.

Finally, Bush's opponents are fighting back, getting the campaign finance bill he opposed through the Senate on Monday, for instance. And it may turn out that the most important vote count in the news on Tuesday was the Senate's 51-50 vote to move Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut along, and block the Democrats' attempt to trim it to pay for a prescription Medicare benefit. The good news for Bush is that it passed, thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote. The bad news for the president is that Senate Democrats are finally learning from their opponents, voting together as a caucus for the very first time to block Bush's right-wing agenda.

Despite the Herald's efforts -- and those of the media consortium set to release an even more exhaustive recount "audit" later this spring -- we may never conclusively know who won the Florida vote. But from the Herald's work, and that of other newspapers and individual journalists, including Salon's Jake Tapper, we know who won the recount battle -- and it was the GOP, in a landslide. Republicans were disciplined and fanatical. They stayed ruthlessly on message, until it was time to change message -- arguing, for instance, that recounts had to obey the strict letter of the law when it came to counting dimpled chads or interpreting the results of Palm Beach's benighted butterfly ballot; then swerving course to say only voter intent should matter when it came to military absentee ballots. They marshaled their forces all across Florida to make sure, in every potential contest, Gore was never allowed to gain even a temporary edge over Bush during any of the recounts.

And in the end they had the votes that counted, the five on the Supreme Court. Of course there's irony in the fact that Bush's handlers zealously fought manual recounts around the state, seeming to believe their man lost the popular vote, when in fact the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount likely would have confirmed his victory. Maybe they too "misunderestimated" their candidate.

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