SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE : Election without a mandate.

Around kitchen tables and water coolers, Americans have been talking politics and even learning about our institutions, but that gleam in the political darkness is fading pretty quickly. The Florida recount, with its multiplying spins and legal maneuvers, its tackiness and excess, has been turning excitement into impatience, and with the certainty of a tainted presidency, neither party is really sure that it wants to win.

Both parties made at least symbolic efforts to bridge the culture gap. Neither succeeded. Bush outdid Dole chiefly by capturing erstwhile Perot supporters. White men and married white women were Bush's sources of strength. Gore drew his from blacks and Latinos and Jews, from single women, from most trade unionists, and from the elderly. (Catholics, divided almost evenly, seem caught between fires.)

Still, Democrats have more reasons than Republicans for discontent, and not only because Bush looks to be the winner. Despite some chilly consolations--Al Gore's edge in the popular vote, for example, or the party's fine new voices in the Senate--for Democrats, this will be a winter of recriminations and regrets. Ralph Nader will be a favored villain, and Hillary Clinton will not be alone in grumbling about the Electoral College, but there are plenty of targets. In an election this close, anything has a claim to be considered decisive.

Yet it was Al Gore's election to lose; he did just that, and not only because he was so wretched in the debates. Probably, prosperity should have been enough to elect him, especially since about two-thirds of the electorate, Republican arguments to the contrary, gave the administration credit for good times. Possibly the economy was too successful, especially since, by focusing on the economic future rather than the past--partly in the hope of putting distance between himself and Bill Clinton--Gore seemed to take the present good times as given, a starting point for argument. That, in turn, made it easier for Bush to appeal to voters' dreams of becoming rich, or at least richer. A lot of us, moreover, felt secure enough to give first place to other issues: foreign policy, for example, or the military, but preeminently the worries about the moral state of the country that, in a CNN poll back in 1999, led economic concerns by a three-to-two margin.

And morality, public or private, is not comfortable ground for Democrats.

That our politics is increasingly dominated by money is no secret: party loyalties are weaker and party organizations weaker still; civil society is fragmenting; it's next to impossible to reach the electorate except through the electronic media. For Republicans, raising money is a comparatively easy nuisance. Democrats, for obvious reasons, have to scramble, cut corners, and take money wherever they can find it (or to look for multimillionaires who can finance campaigns like Jon Corzine in New Jersey or Mark Dayton in Minnesota). Just when Gore and Lieberman had been occupying the moral high ground, they had to interrupt their critique of the media to show up at a Hollywood bash featuring the sex-and-violence crowd, proclaiming good will and disclaiming any intent to censor. It hurt, especially since it revived memories of the Buddhist temple and the White House telephones. And while Gore's effort to distance himself from Bill Clinton was sensible, up to a point, he carried it so far as to be self-defeating: it kept Gore from reminding voters about the ideological obstructionism of the Republican Congress--especially the tragicomedy of impeachment--an argument for voting the Democratic ticket, and one which could have brought Bush's airy superficialities into clearer focus. It was also futile: Keeping the president under wraps did not significantly lessen Clinton fatigue; it only denied Democrats much of the benefit of Clinton's craft and charm.

The real story in the election, however, wasn't the winners and losers; it was the turnout, higher than had been expected (50.7 percent, up from 49 percent in 1996). Voters weren't drawn to the polls by the candidates: comparatively few Democrats felt more than a mild enthusiasm for Gore or more than a half-amused disdain for Bush; Bush benefited from a desire to punish Clinton and all his works, but Bush too inspired only tepid devotion. The nation's view of the candidates was epitomized by a television ad for the candy bar "Snickers," which featured cartoon figures of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, each caricaturing the foibles of that party's candidate. ("My dad and I wear the same pants," the elephant brags, and the donkey rejoins, "I invented pants.") Evidently, advertising research discovered a public judgment that both nominees were jokes.

Voters were apt to say that the issues helped draw them to the polls, and, Ralph Nader aside, they seem to have had little difficulty in detecting differences between the candidates. But that said, the debate over policy was not the sort to arouse any political passion beyond exasperation. Gore was cautious to a fault, far more concerned to defend things as they are than to stake out new territory, softening almost every answer rather than give offense. And on the Republican side, Bush's strategy turned on blurring the issues, especially in social policy, a version of Reagan's style, amiable and given to elision, verging on innumeracy and untroubled by disconfirming facts. Voters can be forgiven, in other words, if they saw the distinctions between the candidates, while real, as relatively marginal.

Yet if the contestants were second-rate and the stakes seemingly low, the race itself was desperately close: the electorate was drawn to the polling places--and to discussions after election day--by an increased sense that individual votes might matter, that citizens might really make a difference. And while individual voters, even in an election as close as this one, are still not significant, a handful of voters in Florida will have decided the presidency of the United States. Back in September, I argued in these pages that the key to the election of 2000 could be found in the popularity of "Survivor," with its implicit appeal to the political animal in our souls, our yearning for something closer to genuine self-government. This November proved the point, I think, in the election and its aftermath.

The candidates themselves barely approached that sentiment. Gore's watchword, "I'll fight for you," offered the vice president as a champion, an advocate for us in the corridors of power. His mastery of detail, his command of numbers and the nuances of policy emphasized his aptitude for infighting among policy elites. But he did not offer to take us with him, nor did he suggest that he needed anything from us beyond our votes. His rhetoric--so often smarmy and falsely sentimental--made virtually no reference to the common life: when Bush suggested that taxes are "the people's money" and not "the government's," Gore did not even make the obvious response that the money is ours. He presented himself as a leader in the high Progressive mold, an expert who will fight our battles for us, not a leader who will make us more able to fight for ourselves. It was in character that Gore rarely referred to party, still the best link between citizens and their representatives.

Bush, by contrast, spoke the language of people for whom government is overwhelming, impersonal, and, at best, indifferent, not much different from the other titanic forces that are hammering their lives. To millions of Americans, especially in the South and West, Bush appeared to be offering a kind of limited immunity, promising to shrink government at home and American involvements abroad. Of course, Bush's promise to "trust the people" amounts to leaving individuals to face the market and globalization more or less alone (just as his program would radically increase inequality). The greater number of voters, especially in and around the metropolitan centers, saw through it and rejected it, and even Bush's supporters hoped for a leader able to get past gridlock. Government, still relatively accountable, is our best hope for a measure of effective self-rule, though it urgently needs to be made better. The Clinton administration has its excellences, but it has been largely indifferent to the need to revive democratic life. Perhaps, out of power, the Democrats will learn better: in both its talk and its silence, the American public, this year, is trying to teach us something.

Wilson Carey McWilliams is the author of Beyond the Politics of Disappointment? American Elections 1980-1999 (Chatham House).