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WASHINGTON — Here’s the story line: In a bizarre and hotly contested election, the son of a U.S. president is installed as chief executive, barely edging a Democratic former U.S. senator from Tennessee who won the nation’s popular vote in the general election. 

The election turmoil drags on week after week. Eventually the president’s son, a Harvard University graduate whose family name helped smooth the path to the presidency, overcomes the Tennessee Democrat, who had campaigned on a platform that said the president must fight for the people and whose supporters are increasingly convinced the election was stolen. 

Sound familiar? That was early in 1825, when the House finally decided the previous year’s November election – and for the first time elevated a president’s son to the White House. 

History offers extraordinary parallels between the contest 175 years ago and the 2000 election. 

“The election of 2000, pitting the son of a president against a candidate from Tennessee, is destined to join the election of 1824, when (there was) the same personal dynamic as one of the closest in our nation’s history – John Quincy Adams against Andrew Jackson,” former President Bush told a recent White House dinner. 

The former president was clearly intrigued by what he called the “potential historical parallel between the Adams and the Bush families.” 

As he spoke, his son, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, and Vice President Al Gore, a former Tennessee senator, were deadlocked in the excruciatingly long recount and legal contest to determine the winner of the 2000 presidential election.  

The nationwide popular vote tally gave Democrat Gore the relatively narrow margin over Bush of a little more than 500,000 votes among almost 105.4 million voters. 

But after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against a hand recount sealed Bush’s win in Florida, where he led by fewer than 1,000 votes, Bush gained the Electoral College majority and was elected officially when the electors met Monday. 

Not since John Quincy Adams had the son of a president won the office. Adams was a Harvard graduate, in 1787; George W. Bush received a masters in business administration from Harvard, in 1975. 

Jackson was elected as Tennessee’s first congressman in 1796 and became a senator from that state the next year. Gore was elected to Congress from Tennessee in 1977, then served in the Senate from 1985 to 1993. Jackson and Gore both campaigned for president as champions of common people. 

In his election, Jackson won 41 percent of the popular vote to Adams’ 31 percent. Most of the remaining votes went to House Speaker Henry Clay and Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. The popular vote was cast by state legislators and not citizens in six of the 24 states. 

No one captured a majority of Electoral College votes, so the election fell to the House, where Clay held sway. He threw his support to Adams, and using the constitutional formula of one vote for each state’s delegation, Adams won 13 votes to seven. Crawford got three votes. 

Adams became president at age 57 in 1825. 

Unlike Adams the younger, 54-year-old George W. Bush lacks prior federal experience and does not advocate a strong role for the government. Where Adams was groomed for the presidency and famously enigmatic, Bush did not spend his life preparing for the job and has a more outgoing personality. 

The parallels are stronger between the patriarchs of the Bush and Adams families. 

Bush, the 41st president, and John Adams, the second president, were born in Boston-area towns less than 10 miles apart, attended Ivy League schools, served as U.S. diplomats and had one-term presidencies dominated by foreign conflicts. Their political successes transformed patrician families into prominent household names continued by their sons. 

The younger Bush still is different from his father, said Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah. 

“I love his father, but his father is an uptight New England preppy who is determined to render public service as a matter of public duty,” said Bennett, who began his 1998 re-election campaign in Utah with former President Bush by his side. George W. Bush “is much more of his own man than a lot of people think. He’s got more Barbara in him than George.” 

“W. is the frat boy who went to Yale and said all these guys are stuffed shirts. He’s looking around thinking, ‘I ain’t ever going to president, and if I am someday, I ain’t ever taking any of these guys with me.”’ 

Bush graduated from Yale in 1968. Gore graduated from Harvard in 1969. 

Jackson and Gore both were tall and commanding in demeanor, but “Old Hickory” Jackson was a rambunctious man, a hard drinker and gambler and a national war hero. Gore focuses on protocol and seems strait-laced and wonkish. 

“Gore should compare himself to Jackson,” said Vanderbilt University political scientist Erwin Hargrove. “Gore has the moral legitimacy, he won more votes. He’d be smart to lay off and wait, come back in four years and win.” 

Which is exactly what Jackson did. 

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On the Net: National Archives Electoral College box scores: http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/elctcoll/ecfront.html