WASHINGTON -- FOR THE ENDGAME in Florida, a standard or two worthy of the presidency seems in order.
For the country's impatient president-in-waiting, a minimal expectation is that Governor Bush not demand that others take high-minded, self-sacrificial steps he himself has refused to take. And for Vice President Gore, a court challenge to the certification of incomplete vote totals needs to have as its central purpose the inclusion of missing votes, and in particular votes that have never been counted, not the exclusion of votes cast in good faith. The only exception should be for what amounts to fraud.
Bush's position is a revealing character test he has already flunked. He asks that Al Gore not contest his Florida co-chair's arbitrarily restricted certification of numbers and concede him the presidency. But put the shoe on the other foot, and pretentious hypocrisy becomes self-evident. A full recount might just as easily have left Gore ahead. In that event, Bush's campaign had already signaled its commitment to contesting any certification of that inconvenient result by Secretary of State Katherine Harris, precisely what it asks Gore not to do.
Much more ominously, Bush has been unwilling to live by the same standards he has sought to impose on Gore. Sunday night he claimed victory after a process his campaign has insisted since three days after the election is illegal. Bush has demonized and refused to accept the Florida Supreme Court's sanctioning of that process of recounts by hand. He has also made plans to proceed to the White House regardless of the outcome of the US Supreme Court's ruling on the legality of the Florida decision.
Indeed, Bush is still prepared for the possibility of his ''election'' via the Republican state Legislature, the US House, or both. He remains prepared, in other words, to become president in the face of a possible determination in Florida, sanctioned by the state and US supreme courts, that Gore won a plurality of votes counted in the state.
Dwell on that for a moment. We already know that Gore's now-safe lead in the popular vote nationally is comfortably above 300,000 votes. We already know that he won more electoral votes outside of Florida than Bush. And now we have a Bush theory of the election that would ignore any plurality in Florida determined by anybody other than Harris. On the legitimacy front, his stance is the moral equivalent of Rutherford B. Hayes's in 1876.
The contrast with Gore on this issue of acceptance and finality is total. We already know he was in his motorcade late on election night, on his way to concede the election after having already phoned Bush, before the vote count finally caught up with TV network projections.
We already know that he was prepared again to fold his tent in the event of an adverse Florida Supreme Court ruling last week. And we now know from Gore himself that he is prepared to accept as final a decision by the state courts on his election contest and by the federal courts on the constitutionality and legality of the state court's decision. If only Bush made the same pledge, the country might have a shot at the genuine finality this mess needs.
Against that background, the contest Gore has filed is more than reasonable under state law that gives a candidate the chance to show that legal votes that were not counted or certified and that would have affected the outcome were not part of the official total. That is why the Bush campaign has chosen to go the PR route and try to discredit even the idea of a contest.
The key to finality are the 10,700 ballots in Miami-Dade County that were not found by machines to contain a vote for president. Without manual inspection, those are ballots that contain machine-missed votes that have never been counted. It is one thing for the local canvassing board to decide not to go through them. But having already decided to, it is a question worthy of a contest whether the board had the right to stop a count it had already begun, with the very outcome of the election at stake.
The same kind of issue arises with votes already counted that Harris refused to certify in both Miami and in Palm Beach before and two hours after the deadline that she enforced arbitrarily. And there is a third, powerful point in the 51 additional votes Bush got because the board in the tiny North Florida county of Nassau, scandalously substituted the raw election night vote for the machine recount.
Put these already known votes together and the 537-vote, certified margin becomes barely 100, more than covered by scattered additions to the Bush total by other Republican-run counties. That's why a contest was filed yesterday and why it's legitimate, especially with Gore prepared to accept court decisions. If only Bush were willing to play by the same rules.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
