This article misses the point in many ways. Bush has rode to power on a coalition of sorts. It is a coalition of regionally based economic powers, that decided to override the national electorate, just as they are accustomed to back home. The coalition is between the Texas business community, the Florida Business community, Southern California interests, and the myriad of smaller regional powers from North Carolina to Arizona, Alabama to Colorado, Tennessee to Missouri,etc.... All are united in coalition, in that they don't like the 'liberalism' of the power brokers from places like New York, Chicago, and Boston. Theelites in those states just stepped aside, to let the cockey upstarts show what they can do. ....If they can thump the people better than we can with Slick Willie....then let 'em go. I'm not sure that The Observer clearly understands what our 'democracy' is all about. Most of the US has no tradition of real democracy ever established in struggle against the local elites. That's why these guys are so cockey and confident. Resistance? Nah. They're more confident than Mississippi Whites back in the '20s. Tony Abdo <The system may not allow for coalitions, but the divisions of the electorate call for a coalitionist mentality to handle them. However confidently he moves to take the oath of office, Bush must offer something more subtle than the simple assertion of his power. To that extent, his confident behaviour now is a kind of sham. For the divisions are in truth very deep, geographically and racially if not so much in old-fashioned ideology: between cities and the country, between south-and-west and north-centre-and-east, between black (90-9 the respective Gore-Bush percentages) and white, above all between those who think Bush won and those who know he didn't. Where these will cause explosions we cannot tell. But they will come. The serenity in which this surreal presidency begins is deceptive. Every mistake Bush makes will excite the same questions: who exactly is this man, and by what right is he there? The rituals of succession can take him to the White House, but provide no bulwark against the doubts that surround his locus, which he refuses, so far, to do anything to appease. The media, the Congress, many of the people, all conspire to make him seem as real as Ike or Reagan. But this can't last. Unless he finds a way to recognise the uniquely narrow limits of his victory, his presidency will unravel and Dubya will eventually be doomed.> _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
