By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 20 2001 (IPS)

George W. Bush, the first candidate in more than a century to lose the national popular vote, took the oath of office as president of the United States here on a dismal and soggy Saturday afternoon, pledging to unite the country which the November elections showed to be deeply divided, along cultural, geographic, and ethnic lines.

In a brief inaugural ceremony during a steady drizzle before the Capitol building, Bush pledged to “work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity” and promised that civility and compassion towards the poor and children would mark his administration.

“Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion, and character,” he said, adding that “civility is not a tactic or a sentiment . It is the determined choice of rust over cynicism, of community over chaos.”

In the 12-minute address, which was long on generalities and references to God, but short on specifics, Bush said his priorities will include education, social security, tax reduction, and building military “defences beyond challenge,” an apparent reference to his ambitious plans to build a controversial national missile defence (NMD) system.

He also promised to maintain US engagement in the world, and, in so doing, to show “purpose without arrogance” and “speak for the values that gave our nation birth.

“The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake,” he said. “America remains engaged in the world, by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favours freedom.”

Bush did not make an explicit appeal to Democrats during the speech; nor did he refer to the closeness of the election. But he did note the existence of serious divisions and the need for the country to unite around “the principles that unite and lead us onward.”

“Sometimes our differences run so deep it seems we share a continent, but not a country,” he said. “We do not accept this, and will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation,” he stressed.

Whether Bush can indeed make much headway in overcoming these differences remains very much in question. The election and its controversial aftermath have exposed sharp divisions which will be difficult to overcome.

Those divisions were much in evidence throughout Washington during the day’s Inauguration event.

Several thousand protestors who, despite the bad weather, turned out, holding signs with such slogans as “Bush = Racism,” “Re-Elect Gore in 2004,” and, the most popular, “Hail to the Thief,” a pun on the musical fanfare of the presidency, “Hail to the Chief.” The latter two were referenced to the controversial way Bush was awarded the election.

While Vice President Al Gore defeated Bush by more than half a million votes in the popular vote, the peculiar workings of the US electoral system and the disputed result in the state of Florida gave Bush the narrowest possible electoral margin.

Recent polls show that most citizens acknowledge Bush as the legitimate winner, but most of the Democratic base – African Americans, labour unions, feminist and environmental organisations, among others – believe very strongly that, if the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court had not stopped the tallying last month of thousands of uncounted Florida ballots, Gore would be the one taking the oath of office here Saturday, instead of Bush.

But the divisions surrounding the closeness and ambiguity of the presidential election result go much deeper into the institutional and popular fabric of the US government.

In Congress, Bush faces an angry, distrustful and stronger Democratic opposition. Democrats now control 50 of the Senate’s 100 seats. That will force Vice President Dick Cheney, already seen as the new administration’s “chief executive officer”, to spend a lot of his precious time hanging around the Capitol building in order to cast tie-breaking votes.

In the 435-seat House of Representatives, the Republican majority is down to five. Worse for Bush, the House leadership is dominated by the party’s right wing whose own legislative ambitions may run counter to his own desire to forge bipartisan coalitions behind key initiatives.

With the political divide so finely balanced in Congress it is not just a matter of partisan or even class politics, according to recent analyses.

“There are two Americas, and when you look at the electoral map, the division has never been clearer,” according to Benjamin Barber, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “One is an old-fashioned America of traditional values. The other wants a much more open, diverse society, less judgmental of people.”

Indeed the most telling predictors of voting behaviour were such factors as gun ownership, church observance, and marital status. More than 60 percent of people who own guns voted for Bush; the same percentage who don’t own guns voted for Gore.

Similarly, almost two-thirds of voters who attend church more than once a week voted for Bush; the same percentage of people who never attend church voted for Gore. And almost two thirds of the overwhelmingly white people who live in rural areas or small towns voted for Bush; the same percentage of city-dwellers voted for Gore.

Against these differences, the election also exposed widening gender and racial gaps. Men preferred Bush by 11 percentage points, while women voted for Gore by 12 points, according to the exit polls.

Much more spectacular, Bush won only nine percent of the black vote, the lowest percentage of any Republican candidate in a generation, and, despite the appointment of three African Americans to Cabinet slots, only 13 percent of blacks said last week they approved of Bush’s performance to date.

Bush and his advisers seem very aware of these differences, and their strategy so far appears to be to mute the more right-wing opinions of their more controversial appointments, such as Attorney-General-Designate John Ashcroft, and to rapidly push a legislative agenda, notably on education and health care on which Democrats – and even some of his staunchest foes – can agree.

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