5.
B. 是一个悖论，见第四，五段注释。
A. 比喻。 C. 对归纳法和演绎法的赞扬。 D. 双关语。
Passage Four (It Is Bush)
On the 36th
day after they had voted, Americans finally learned Wednesday who would be
their next president: Governor George W. Bush of Texas.
Vice President Al
Gore, his last realistic avenue for legal challenge closed by a U. S. Supreme
Court decision late Tuesday, planned to end the contest formally in a televised
evening speech of perhaps 10 minutes, advisers said.
They said that Senator
Joseph Lieberman, his vice presidential running mate, would first make brief
comments. The men would speak from a ceremonial chamber of the Old Executive
office Building,
to the west of the White House.
The dozens of political
workers and lawyers who had helped lead Mr. Gore’s unprecedented fight to claw
a come-from-behind electoral victory in the pivotal state of Florida were
thanked Wednesday and asked to stand down.
“The vice president
has directed the recount committee to suspend activities,” William Daley, the
Gore campaign chairman, said in a written statement.
Mr. Gore authorized
that statement after meeting with his wife, Tipper, and with top advisers
including Mr. Daley.
He was expected to
telephone Mr. Bush during the day. The Bush campaign kept a low profile and
moved gingerly, as if to leave space for Mr. Gore to contemplate his next
steps.
Yet, at the end of a
trying and tumultuous process that had focused world attention on sleepless
vote counters across Florida, and on courtrooms form Miami to Tallahassee to
Atlanta to Washington the Texas governor was set to become the 43d U. S.
president.
The news of Mr. Gore’s
plans followed the longest and most rancorous dispute over a U. S.
presidential election in more than a century, one certain to leave scars in a
badly divided country.
It was a bitter ending
for Mr. Gore, who had outpolled Mr. Bush nationwide by some 300000 votes, but,
without Florida, fell short in the Electoral College by 271votes to 267-the
narrowest Electoral College victory since the turbulent election of 1876.
Mr. Gore was said to
be distressed by what he and many Democratic activists felt was a partisan
decision from the nation’s highest court.
The 5-to –4 decision
of the Supreme Court held, in essence, that while a vote recount in Florida could be
conducted in legal and constitutional fashion, as Mr. Gore had sought, this
could not be done by the Dec. 12 deadline for states to select their
presidential electors.
James Baker 3rd,
the former secretary of state who represented Mr. Bush in the Florida
dispute, issued a short statement after the U. S. high court ruling, saying
that the governor was “very pleased and gratified.”
Mr. Bush was planning
a nationwide speech aimed at trying to begin to heal the country’s deep, aching
and varied divisions. He then was expected to meet with congressional leaders,
including Democrats. Dick Cheney, Mr. Bush’s ruing mate, was meeting with
congressmen Wednesday in Washington.
When Mr. Bush, who is
54, is sworn into office on Jan.20, he will be only the second son of a president to follow his father to the
White House, after John Adams and John Quincy Adams in the early 19th
century.
Mr. Gore, in his
speech, was expected to thank his supporters, defend his hive-week battle as an
effort to ensure, as a matter of principle, that every vote be counted, and
call for the nation to join behind the new president. He was described by an
aide as “resolved and resigned.”
While some
constitutional experts had said they believed states could present electors as
late as Dec. 18, the U. S.
high court made clear that it saw no such leeway.
The U.S. high court
sent back “for revision” to the Florida court its order allowing recounts but
made clear that for all practical purposes the election was over.
In its unsigned main
opinion, the court declared, “The recount process, in its features here
described, is inconsistent with the minimum procedures necessary to protect the
fundamental right of each voter.”
That decision, by a
court fractured along philosophical lines, left one liberal justice charging
that the high court’s proceedings bore a political taint.
Justice John Paul
Stevens wrote in an angry dissent:” Although we may never know with complete
certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the
identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the
judge as an impartial guardian of the law.”
But at the end of five
seemingly endless weeks, during which the physical, legal and constitutional
machines of the U. S. election were pressed and sorely tested in ways unseen in
more than a century, the system finally produced a result, and one most
Americans appeared to be willing at lease provisionally to support.
The Bush team welcomed
the news with an outward show of restraint and aplomb. The governor’s hopes had
risen and fallen so many times since Election night, and the legal warriors of
each side suffered through so many dramatic reversals, that there was little
energy left for celebration.
