Imagine for a moment what it was like to be Al Gore on Wednesday morning. The man who said the presidential election wasn't a popularity contest won the popularity contest. He collected more votes than Bill Clinton ever did, more votes than any other Democrat in history. But like his father before him, he couldn't hold on to his home state, and that could cost him the race. The most fervent environmentalist in national politics was foiled by the Green Party; the guy who as a young Congressman made his name investigating tainted baby formula and influence peddling by the contact-lens industry lost because of a few thousand votes for a mischievous consumer advocate. Gore is the one who campaigned as though every vote counted - and he was right.

Now imagine what it was like to be George W. Bush. He had led for 20 out of the last 26 weeks in the polls, and his advisers had promised he would win it in a walk. Now his life depended on a state he viewed as a family colony. His entire message was built around the promise to heal the divide, restore people's faith in a system that seemed cruddy and cracked. Now the count comes in and the cracks have deepened, no matter who wins and how. All through his life he followed his father's footsteps, to Yale and flight school and the oil patch, but once he got there, the prizes had lost some of their honor and shine. The biggest prize of all was now within reach, back in the family, but even if he finally wins, he has to wonder what it's worth.

The rest of us woke up Wednesday morning not knowing who would be the next leader of the free world; not knowing when we would know; not knowing if the eventual winner would be able to govern, with a Senate split down the middle and a teeny Republican edge in the House and a nation so neatly and clearly and evenly divided that it would take a pair of tweezers to find a mandate in the results. Neither side even tried.

The world's greatest economic powerhouse, cradle of the information age, was counting ballots by hand. One hundred million people had voted, and the outcome danced in the margin of error. There were murmurs from all over the country, not just in Florida, of broken voting machines and missing registrations and disappearing ballot boxes and intimidation and confusion, a growing conviction among true believers on both sides that this prize was about to be stolen. The sleep-deprived commentariat talked of a country divided and a constitutional crisis looming, which may not have been true, but it didn't hurt ratings. The markets shivered but did not collapse; people still read the sports pages first.

After 18 months and $286 million, the 2000 presidential election looked as if it might be decided by one-five-thousandth of 1% of the vote. Gore seemed to have won a moral victory, but he may not have won an actual one. His 222,880-vote lead in the popular tally was the fuel for his campaign's demand for a manual recount in some Florida counties, for time to register the outcome of the absentee ballots there, and for the nation to show some patience. And so the end of one campaign marked the beginning of another. "The American people have now spoken," Bill Clinton declared, "but it's going to take a while to determine exactly what they said."

Where we're going there are no maps and no guardrails. These two men have choices to make. Both talked about the will of the people and the rule of law, of bringing the country together, but as the hours and then days passed, the temperature began to rise, and so did the stakes.

In public, the Bush position was essentially this: "We've won. Gore lost. And while we're willing to have one recount because the public believes in fairness, don't expect us to go along with this forever." It's no accident that James Baker, the former Secretary of State and former President Bush's best friend, was named to take charge of this battle. He is extremely experienced at sending layers of signals simultaneously, and so he sent different messages to the Democrats and to the nation.

To the American people he said: We're one of the great nations on earth that transfers power peacefully. That meant Gore is taking a crowbar to that tradition; how much damage are people prepared to tolerate? Baker said he was prepared to wait for the absentee ballots, all due by this Friday, but drew a line at the prospect of a third count, by hand this time, of the Florida ballots.

That is because those ballots frighten the Bush camp. On the confusing "punch card" ballots, some voters did not punch through the hole and left a little paper flap hanging. A machine may not recognize this punch as a vote, but a human being might, which is what the Democrats are hoping. They could pick up a thousand votes or two this way; the first may have already given them an extra 1,457. On Saturday morning, Baker announced that the Bush campaign had gone to federal court to block any manual recount. MORE>>

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