Viewing the election from the Right.

This was the year the 1876 law would work -- kind of

It was going to be a long night, I'd told myself Election Day. I had no idea just how long it would turn out to be. This night was going to last 36 days.

All through the campaign, I'd been telling myself Al Gore would win by a hair, half believing it, half to steel myself. But it wasn't turning out that way at all. He was winning big, as one state after another turned blue on the television screen early in the evening. I was turning a little blue myself.

But I'd been through this before, lots of times, and it always passed, more quickly every time. You get used to losing when you're born in the South and, sometime in your wasted youth back in the 1950s, doubtless out of sheer contrariness, you decide to become both a Republican and integrationist. Which were much the same thing back then, when civil rights bills were being sponsored by the likes of Robert A. Taft.

So when Florida went blue early in the evening, and Pennsylvania and Michigan, too, I knew all was lost. Again. I started framing another of those gracious Hail to the Chief editorials I'd had so much practice at.

Harry Truman had the right idea. On election night, 1948, he'd had a sandwich and a glass of milk around 8, and gone to bed. Victory could wait. Defeat can, too, so I went home and hit the sack. There would be plenty of time to do the gracious thing the next morning.

By dawn's early light, all was confusion. Bush had won, not won, and it was still too early to call. Gore had conceded, then unconceded. A month Later, even by the time I started to write this piece for The Masthead, I was afraid it would have to end: To Be Continued.

Who had carried Florida? In my book the best answer comes from my favorite mathematician, John Allen Paulos, who by now has educated a whole generation of us innumerates. "The margin of error in this election," he explained, "is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins."

Less important than answering the unanswerable was getting the country a president. Happily, there were laws in place to do just that. Not just state laws but, though Al Gore's lawyers would deny it in every venue, federal ones. It seems a couple of gentlemen named Hayes and Tilden had got the country into a similar fix back in 1876, and a decade later a law was passed to prevent any recurrence.

That part of the federal code specifies a date by which a state's electors could no longer be challenged, and even Florida's Supreme Court would eventually recognize it. This was the year that old law would work, kind of. But not immediately.

The only thing clear the day after the vote was that A] Gore had accomplished the impossible: He'd made Richard Nixon look like a gentleman. Everybody was going back to 1960 and digging up another vice president's concession. For despite some dubious returns from South Chicago and South Texas that year, and much to the disgust of his more fervent followers, Dick Nixon had thrown in the towel. It was his finest hour -- in a career that wouldn't have many fine hours.

Al Gore wasn't about to give up that easily. He took his cue not from Richard Nixon but from a Republican of another century, James G. Blaine. ("When I want a thing,] want it dreadfully") Even before first light in Florida, battalions of lawyers were being airlifted to the front.

But all the talk about an "illegal" butterfly ballot in Palm Beach sounded bogus from the start. Designed by a Democratic official, it was used elsewhere without question. No, the butterfly ballot proved only a feint to cover the main thrust of the attack, which was to count/cast/ conjure up every possible Democratic vote/attempted vote/intended vote.

Soon the whole circus was being televised nationally, as election officials peered earnestly at punchcard after punchcard, and the c-word not only entered the American vocabulary but overwhelmed it. A blizzard of chad -- hanging and dimpled, real and imagined -- blurred whatever clarity this election had left, like a record snowfall blotting out all roads, fences, and once-familiar boundaries.

Soon every relevant precedent was being cited to justify this spectacle, and quite a few irrelevant ones. Like what Texas law had to say about Florida elections (not much) or a precedent from Illinois that, it turned out, wasn't.

The whole, bizarre, chad-covered white-out was inevitable -- from the moment folks stopped counting votes and began divining intentions. Count 'em once, count 'em twice, count em thrice with chicken soup and rice.... To quote a former governor of Arkansas, we'd opened up a whole box of Pandoras .

Elections make everybody a little crazy as anybody in charge of editing letters to the editor knows, but this year the real craziness set in after the polls closed. One of the remarkable things about this post-election election was that neither side could fathom how the other could actually believe the arguments it was making.

The second American presidential election of 2000 soon became an exercise in gestalt psychology as we set out to divine the intentions of voters from "the totality" of their ballots. Or at least the ballots in selected precincts in selected counties. It seemed an insane game. Yet here were all these perfectly serious people playing it.

Elections make everybody a little crazy, as anybody in charge of editing letters to the editor knows, but this year the real craziness set in after the polls closed. One of the remarkable things about this post-election election was that neither side could fathom how the other could actually believe the arguments it was making.

I had no doubt about the Gore people's sincerity which only increased my wonder at their inability to see what was so plain to the rest of us: Their candidate didn't really want every vote counted, but only Gore votes. Certainly not military votes.

Soon lawsuits were being filed everywhere by everybody Worse, everybody was talking like a lawyer. Law-logic, as opposed to the real kind, was covering the talk shows and, worse, appearing in editorials. Oracles were telling us they could read the Will of the People not in entrails but spoiled ballots. Litigation replaced deliberation, and passion overruled reason.

Florida's judicial branch was being asked to decide who would head the executive branch of the federal government. And its Supreme Court appeared eager to do so, whatever the law said about deadlines and procedures and letting Florida's secretary of state use her discretion. Not to mention the Constitution of the United States, which leaves it to the state legislatures to prescribe the manner in which electors are to be chosen.

It was only a small snowball at first, this constitutional crisis a-borning, but as it roiled down the mountainside, it was acquiring a momentum of its own. Circuit judges who tried to do their duty under Florida's quite explicit election code were overruled by that state's Supreme Court, which was issuing injunctions without being asked and ordering recounts of recounts.

Sometimes the recounts were of just some part of some counties, sometimes of all the undervotes (ballots without a presidential choice) but never of the overvotes (ballots with two presidential choices).

It seems like a bad dream now. The official in charge of Florida's elections was excoriated, to put it mildly for everything from her deference to deadlines to her mascara. For a while I kept a list of the names Katherine Harris was called till they overflowed my filing cabinet. First she was badmouthed for following the deadline for certifying the votes clearly mandated by that state's laws; then Florida's supremes chastised her for following the new, later deadline they had plucked out of the air. Cruella De Vil could do no right.

The smear job was scarcely surprising. Indeed, the only real surprise in the whole circus is that a scion of the Chicago Daleys couldn't dig up a couple of thousand votes for his man in the most Democratic part of Florida. It is the plaint of every generation: We are not the men our fathers were.

What a show: The worst of causes had the most charming of advocates -- David Boies -- and both sides were filled with a passionate intensity. That rolling snowball was becoming an avalanche. Strangely enough, the center was holding. Only the politicos seemed excited; the American public remained perfectly calm. As if it knew the U.S. Cavalry would arrive in time. In black robes.

But at the moment Florida's legislature was preparing to enter the fray. What would happen if two sets of electors showed up to cast that state's decisive votes, and Congress was called on to settle matters? Or maybe unsettle them. Wild scenarios proliferated, including one in which Al Gore cast the decisive vote in the U.S. Senate to recognize his own electors, and another in which the presidency devolved on the (very) senior member of the Senate, Strom Thurmond.

What, the Gore people worry? They couldn't see any constitutional crisis developing. This was indeed a difference between conservatives and liberals. In our system of ordered liberty, conservatives instinctively understood that, without the order, the liberty will prove meaningless. We were concerned most with stability; continuity; and the change that comes about through traditional means, and so lasts. Edmund Burke would have been the best critic of this post-election election.

Others are more concerned about following an abstract principle -- like justice, equality, or plurality rule. If necessary, they were willing to follow it right over the nearest cliff. Not that they ever saw any cliff. They seemed to think this whole matter could have been resolved by just peering at a few more cards again. And again, until the right result emerged. Or rather the left.

When the employee newsletter here at the paper sent out a questionnaire asking folks what they wanted for Christmas, I hadn't hesitated: "All, I want for Christmas is a president. Free and clear." I got my wish 10 days ahead of time -- in the form of a president and precedent from the Supreme Court of the United States. Concession and conciliation suddenly filled the air. Christmas had come early. SCOTUS had overridden SCOFLA, hooray, hooraw. And all the jabberwocky finally ended.

At last, our long national daydream was over. Al Gore would give the best, or at least the most welcome, speech of his life. The only possible criticism I could think to make of his textbook-gracious, sportsmanlike concession was to note that it had come 36 days late. The constitutional crisis had been averted, and the heroine freed from the railroad tracks -- but only after an agonizing wait. What a pity he'd put all of us, not least himself, through this paper chase.

The hero of the story (and of so many others) was the Supreme Court of the United States, or at least seven-ninths of it. Two of the justices couldn't see a constitutional crisis if it were staring them in the face, which it was. The other seven didn't agree on much, but all found the decision of Florida's Supreme Court less than supreme. Only Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Ginsburg would have sat by and watched this train of events go right over the cliff.

In the end, SCOTUS had ridden to the rescue again. Naturally it was roundly denounced -- by the most intemperate outburst of criticism since George Wallace and Lester Maddox were leading the charge against the law of the land. Justice Ginsburg was particularly eloquent on the subject of states' rights -- or at least the rights of state judiciaries, not state legislatures. The news photos prove she wore a black robe when hearing oral arguments; I had only imagined it was Confederate gray.

Whatever the rhetorical fallout, my sense was that the American people were grateful to the real Supreme Court for finally dropping the curtain on a show that had gone on too long and turned into a farce, and a dangerous one. The next president of the United States may have to establish his legitimacy, but the legitimacy of the Supreme Court remains strong. The moral of the story is an old one: God looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. God save that honorable court.

NCEW member Paul Greenberg, a Pulitzer Prize winner in editorial writing, is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.