US election - Bush must rebuild burnt bridges

DESPITE the threat of a legal and political quagmire hanging over the US presidential election, George W Bush has comfortably won a second term as President of the United States of America.

By doing the only realistic thing open to him conceding defeat John Kerry averted the political chaos that would inevitably follow if he insisted on counting Ohio's 250,000 absentee and provisional ballots, votes cast in cases where the rights of a person to actually vote were in doubt.

The distant hope of Democrats was that they could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by bridging the gap between Kerry and Bush.