Gore camp talking of defeat

TALLAHASSE - With Al Gore's contest of the Florida election dragging through a second day, and no sign of the judge ordering any vote recounts, time appeared to be slipping away from the Vice-President in his effort to prove he deserves to be the next occupant of the White House.

Gore's lawyers, appearing yesterday in the district court in the Florida capital, Tallahassee, were reduced to pleading with Judge N. Sanders Sauls to start recounts in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties before it is too late.

Lawyers for George W. Bush, meanwhile, calmly called their witnesses, cut down to just four from an initial list of over 90, and bombarded the court with requests to broaden the scope of the trial to include hundreds of thousands more ballots and at least two more counties.

A ruling by Sauls was expected today after proceedings were adjourned last night - leaving a week for any recount, plus the inevitable legal appeals, before Florida's electors are due to be named on December 12. So much has to go in Gore's direction, including a ruling by the US Supreme Court on the validity of the manual recounts in Florida, that even he and his top advisers have begun tacitly admitting the game may soon be up.

Warren Christopher, the super-cautious former Secretary of State who has been Gore's legal overseer in Florida, said that the battle was not over. But he added: "I can assure you that the Vice-President, when the time comes, will concede in a very gracious way. He understands his obligations."

The use of the future tense, not the conditional, and his choice of "when" rather than "if," were telling indicators of the Gore camp's mood. And last night Gore, aware of the growing frustration with the legal manoeuvring, said: "It won't last forever, I'm expecting that it'll be over with within the next two weeks."

Gore told CBS's 60 Minutes programme that if he lost all of his legal challenges, he would recognise Bush as America's and "my President."

"If at the end of the day, when all processes have taken place, if George Bush is sworn in as President, he will be my President, he will be America's President.

"On January 20, if the person standing up before the Capitol taking the Oath of Office is George Bush and not me, he will be sworn in as my President too and I will spare no efforts in saying to people who supported me 'Let's not have any talk about stealing the election ... "'

Dick Cheney, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said it was time for Gore to concede, because Bush had been certified the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes and time was running short for an effective transition.

In the Tallahassee courtroom, proceedings focused with almost surreal tranquillity on the niceties of punch-card machines and the likelihood that dimples made beneath a candidate's punch-hole could indicate intent to vote.

The arguments broke little new ground beyond the endless back and forth now familiar to cable television viewers: David Boies, Gore's lead lawyer, insisted on the fullest and most generous possible consideration of votes while his counterpart in the Bush camp, Barry Richard, accused his adversaries of requesting "three free shots at the basket" to manufacture the result they wanted.

The Bush team, which finished with its final witness after more than eight hours of proceedings, served notice it would ask Sauls not to consider as evidence ballots in question from Miami-Dade. It said its witnesses had proven those ballots had been shuffled by hand and recounted by machines so many times they could no longer prove the intent of any voter in cases where the ballots were not cleanly punched.

A couple of times Sauls gave hints of his own feelings, looking noticeably bored during the testimony of one of Gore's expert witnesses, election specialist Kimball Brace, and hailing one of the Republicans' witnesses, Palm Beach canvassing board chairman Charles Burton, as a "great American" even though his team failed to complete their manual recount.

Gore appeared to win some time-pressure relief, meanwhile, from Florida legislators who had been threatening to appoint their own slate of presidential electors - favouring Bush - at a special session on Thursday. Although the speaker of the Florida House, a hard-right Republican called Tom Feeney, said he was ready to go ahead, the president of the Senate, the more pragmatic John McKay, said he was not prepared to make a decision. "This is perhaps the most important issue that the Legislature will ever face. The Senate will not be rushed to judgement. We have only one chance to get this right."

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT, REUTERS

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