KEEPING UP WITH FLORIDA: A NATION WATCHES

The twists and turns in Florida are as slippery as a blacktop road in Southeast Missouri after a freezing rain. While most Americans are following the crashes and pile-ups, a good many of us are discovering that it is more and more difficult to keep track of everything at once.

It was a disappointment that the Florida Supreme Court ruled Tuesday night in favor of hand counting of votes in some counties without any rules regarding which ballots to count.

The court missed an opportunity to set partisan politics aside (all but one of the judges is a Democrat) and to call a halt, as provided in state law, to the ongoing effort to find enough dimpled, damaged or dinged ballots that could be tallied as votes for Al Gore.

And it was a disappointment when Gore's lawyers trooped into court Wednesday after Dade County election officials halted all counting of all ballots. (While it would be nice to think the Dade County officials were guided by the best motives, it is more likely they were simply overwhelmed by the prospect of having to manually count thousands of ballots, as the Supreme Court allowed, by the Sunday or early Monday deadline, as set by the same Supreme Court. For further analysis of the serpentine trail of events in the Sunshine State, see Paul Greenberg's column elsewhere on this page.)

The statute's intent

It looks as if the Florida Legislature may convene in special session to give its own interpretation of its own statute regarding the certification of elections. Even the author of the statute in question, a Democrat, disagrees with the state's Supreme Court and supports the attempts of Secretary of State Katherine Harris to put a timely end to the election.

There are those who say the legal manipulations of the past few days have brought the nation to a constitutional crisis, citing the ever-increasing volume of debate, uncertainty and lack of a clear-cut winner. But others see a seldom-used process being tested to its limit, and it is only the fact that the country so rarely turns to this process that gives it dimensions of hesitation and uncertainty.

Several steps left

There are still a good many steps left before the country must face any possibility that the institution of the presidency is in jeopardy.

First would come the credentialing of Florida's presidential electors. This could come either from an end to the legal wrangling and an acceptance on both sides of the vote tally, or from a vote of the Florida legislature.

Then the acceptance of those credentials would move first to the U.S. House of Representatives and, if necessary, to the U.S. Senate (in which case Vice President Gore would likely be in a position of casting the deciding vote to break a tie of evenly split senators.)

What a lesson all of this is -- a painful one, but a remarkable illustration of how democratic processes work without the use of military force.

In the end, we'll have a president, perhaps not the one we want. But he will be the president, and, if every measure is taken to safeguard the institution of the presidency, that man will have complete authority to govern fully for the next four years.

Any clouds over a presidency that has weathered the typhoons of this year's election could quickly vanish, provided the next president, whoever he is, steps up to the task of leadership. This would require setting aside the bickering head-butting that has become the hallmark of today's political squabbles which, by the way, are no substitute for well-reasoned management of the most powerful nation on the planet.