WASHINGTON
NO, IT AIN'T OVER. And the danger now is that it may never be.
It's tough enough when it is not clear who got more votes nationally in the presidential election.
That question, at least, is one we know is eventually going to be answered. At last check late Friday, Al Gore was ahead of George W. Bush by the tiny margin of 250,000 votes.
The nightmare is not so much if that holds up through mountains of absentee votes in California and New York. The real nightmare is that we also end up not able to know who got more votes in the state that will determine who gets the required 270 electoral votes to become president. That would be Florida.
Al Gore cannot become president that way. George Bush not only could; his strategy envisages it.
And nightmares even worse than that also loom, partly because of our electoral system, designed 200 years ago in a compromise with pro-slavery states, and partly because of the strategies followed since Nov. 8 by Governor Bush.
Imagine a situation where there is a minority president nationally and a process underway that might have decided whether he was in the minority in Florida as well. But that process is then short-circuited by legal and guerrilla maneuvers on behalf of that candidate. That actually began to happen in Fort Lauderdale late Thursday evening and all day Friday.
Al Gore cannot become president that way. George Bush not only could; his strategy envisages it.
Or imagine a situation where there is a minority president nationally and hard evidence has emerged on the public record that he got a minority of the votes counted, as opposed to certified by his state campaign cochair, who doubles as the elections boss, in Florida as well.
Al Gore cannot become president that way. George Bush not only could; his strategy envisages it.
Bush is positioned, in other words, to become president more as Rutherford B. Hayes did in 1876 than as Benjamin Harrison did in 1888. Harrison may have been a minority president, but he managed to beat Grover Cleveland cleanly in enough states to win the electoral votes he needed.
Hayes, however, was not only a minority vote-getter against Sam Tilden; he lacked clean wins in three states (Florida was one) that covered his Electoral College majority. The fact his case was fixed here is less important than the fact that his ''victory'' was double-tainted - and for all time.
The Bush campaign is just as prepared to visit even worse nightmares on the country this time around, but let's put them aside for a moment and put the bad dream shoe on Gore's foot.
Obviously Gore initially had a poor public posture when his campaign filed for recounts by hand of machine-discarded ballots in four Florida counties where he was most likely to gain votes if the process went forward. The danger was that going ahead of Bush statewide would lack credibility if it was based on hand recounts in only a few Democratic counties.
Recognizing this, it mattered that Gore himself offered to support statewide recounting by hand if Bush was interested, which could still take place by either judicial order or mutual agreement. The governor, however, said no.
And notice, also, that Secretary of State Katherine Harris has (in her only independent act not in synch with the Bush campaign) no problem with recounting by hand per se; quite the contrary. Instead, she has used ''deadlines'' (artificial, not mandated by law, according to every judge who has examined them) to keep counted votes from being ''certified,'' thus making the above-described nightmares possible.
But her candidate could make it even worse than that. You could have, for example, an eventual Florida result that officially has Gore with more votes but is overturned because Bush wins his federal lawsuit seeking to preempt the state's electoral processes.
Or even worse, more like the awful Hayes precedent, you could have a Gore-first state result, no federal court intervention, but a successful Bush fight to make him president via the House of Representatives.
To repeat: Al Gore cannot become president that way. George Bush not only could; his strategy envisages the possibility.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
