World News 04-11-2004 Bush Promises Unity and War who: George W Bush what: Declares election victory over "gracious" Senator John Kerry where: Washington DC when: Yesterday snippet: "With a mandate of full legitimacy at last, George Bush told the world yesterday he would continue to wage an unrelenting war on terror," ays The Independent, "and pledged to his own people - including supporters of John Kerry - that he would do his utmost to bring a divided nation together." "58,640,761 Americans dismissed Kerry as an untrustworthy `flip- flopper` who kept changing his mind, and settled for the leader they knew," says The Mirror. "It was the highest number of votes for any US presidential candidate in history and gave Bush 51 per cent of the popular vote to Kerry`s 48 per cent." "Once it looked like an aberration. Now it is an era," says The Guardian. George W Bush`s tenure in the White House began with a fiasco in Florida in 2000, writes Jonathan Freedland, but "yesterday that changed, changed utterly. President Bush and his Republican army recorded a famous victory, one that may come to be seen as more than a mere election triumph - rather, a turning point in American life." The Sun says it was not just a defeat for the Democrats but also a "drubbing" for "the lucrative polling organisations who proved not for the first time that they might just as well make it up". "Exit polls costing millions of dollars were so badly wrong," writes political editor Trevor Kavanagh, "that news organisations around the world came close to awarding John Kerry the prize before the first real votes had been counted." [... more]

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