OW IT IS GETTING nasty, and that tone could damage the national polity more seriously than all the political and legal maneuvers, whether they end up delivering the White House to Vice President Al Gore or Texas Governor George W. Bush.
Bush must know that he is in a battle for legitimacy as well as for victory. Yet this cause was ill-served when he ripped into the Florida Supreme Court for a decision which cited ''the right of the people to cast their vote'' as its paramount concern.
What could be more democratic - more American - than making every effort to make sure that election results accurately reflect the voters' will?
Clearly there were problems in parts of Florida. The initial machine recount of the state narrowed the Bush lead from 1,784 to 300. Problems are frequently significant in districts that use punch-card voting of the type used in several Florida counties. Hand counts are commonly employed, in Texas and elsewhere, to discern voter intent.
It was ludicrous for Bush to call the hand count approved by the state Supreme Court ''a process that invites human error and mischief.'' And it was worse when he said the unanimous court ''rewrote the law'' and overreached its authority.
''Writing laws is the duty of the Legislature; administering laws is the duty of the executive branch,'' Bush said, implying that the court had transgressed doubly.
What Bush ignored is that the primary duty of the courts is to interpret laws and especially to make sense out of conflicting laws. The Florida Supreme Court did precisely that in considering the statutory approval of recounts that would necessarily take longer than the one-week certification deadline set out in another law.
Given the court's directive, it was wrong for the election canvassers in Miami-Dade County to end its recount. Perhaps they could not complete a full tally without taking an additional week, but failing to do the best job possible disenfranchises many of their citizens - and may change history.
Most disturbing of all were the implications from Bush aide James Baker and others, including Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney, a Republican, that the state Legislature was considering writing new laws after the fact or even intervening in the naming of the state's representatives to the Electoral College, substituting its judgment for that of 6 million voters. This was the first talk that has had the scent of a banana republic to it.
