Chad Happens

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Meanwhile, the campaign replays in screaming miniature, the long race for the White House shrunk to fit in a shoebox. The sharpest, most dangerous legal brains on earth are folded up and stuffed into a three-block stretch of sleepy Tallahassee, borrowing strangers' desks, living on doughnuts, men and women who have negotiated treaties and broken monopolies and saved the dollar and brokered peace in the Middle East. "We win every day. We lose every day," said a top Gore soldier. "This place is totally rigged against us, and yet we are trying to do something no one has ever done before: change a presidential election."

Gore spent the week where he has spent the whole year--in the weeds, spitting out e-mails, plotting every move. His team saw the public relations war sooner, launched the legal war faster. Gore was able to do in extremis what he could not do during his campaign: rally his party, enlist all the ghosts of campaigns past and get them to play together. But if he was tactically shrewd to offer to meet with Bush, drop all the lawsuits and recount ballots across the whole state, not just in heavily Democratic counties, he couldn't resist taking the truth out for a spin. "What is at stake here is more important than who wins the presidency," he said, and talked about that special something we all cherish and pledge allegiance to. "That's what I'm focused on. Not the contest, but our democracy."

As for Bush, who decamped to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, there was no escaping the contradictions. The man who says he trusts the people placed his faith in the machines; he was protesting a law allowing hand counts, having signed one himself in Texas; he trusts the states, not the lawyers, yet he was the first one into federal court to try to halt the hand count. Congressional Republicans seethed that Bush was losing the air war; he seemed to be almost hiding from the reality of what he faced, leaving the fight to Jim Baker and Dick Cheney while he played Greta Garbo. At a lunch for Republican Senators last week, allies were handing out red, white and blue ribbons that read 'TIL GEORGE BUSH GETS JUSTICE, as though he were a political prisoner.

But if Bush prevails, a more serious challenge awaits him. His campaign was built less around what he promised to do than how he would do it. He argued that our politics was broken, "so much anger...so much division," he said, and everything would be better if we just elected him to fix it. Now we find that maybe the public wants it broken, likes it this way, the divisions sanctified by 100 million choices. We are at least two countries, evenly matched, divided by geography and gender and maybe even more by culture and values, one traditional, one tolerant, and we elected a Congress that perfectly represents the split. You can split the Senate in two, but the presidency is one man, indivisible.

Both parties were already trying to imagine down what road lay victory. At this point, what's it worth anyway? "Hollow," says a senior Democrat. The presidency is hard enough without winning it accidentally. With a government so divided, there can be no faking comity; either all sides truly work together, or they sit in their tall cherrywood seats gathering dust until a new army takes their place.