here is a reason why modern presidential campaigns last nearly two years and take candidates on an almost incomprehensible odyssey from a series of cow-pasture-primaries to the national conventions and ultimately to a two-month cross-country sprint known as the general election.
It is to test their mettle, to probe their will, to learn how the candidates will act and react to exhausting circumstances that not even their most experienced strategists can accurately predict. Their ability to withstand this test becomes as important as the issues they espouse.
And in the year 2000, when George W. Bush and Al Gore received equally mediocre grades, they have been presented the unprecedented opportunity to redeem themselves through the following question: How would you handle a virtual tie?
The answer: dismally.
What the public has seen in the last week validates every bit of voter trepidation developed over the last year. Forget all the talk about how neither man will have a mandate as president. The real problem, increasingly apparent, is that neither one has the ability to govern. At a time when we need towering figures, we've been presented with a group of self-entitled munchkins.
First Gore. The same man who brought you the memorable phrase, ''No controlling legal authority,'' now bestows on the public this gift for the ages: ''You don't have to be snippy about it.''
True to persnickety form, he was the first to raise the specter of court suits when his campaign chairman, Bill Daley, said last Thursday that Gore would support legal action to push a new vote in Palm Beach County.
Daley called it ''an injustice unparalled in our history.'' Please.
Gore has since tried to act laughably casual, jogging through Nashville, playing touch football in Washington, attending church on Sunday morning. But there's been no sense that he will abide by the voters' will, no indication that he won't seek to win an election in court that he has lost at the ballot booth.
Then Bush. Still lacking the necessary 270 electoral votes, he began talking about his transition last week, throwing out the name Colin Powell in hopes that it would make things OK.
The more he talked, the more he looked like a rich, oversized kid sitting at a tiny presidential desk playing the game of ''Pretend,'' with everyone around him saying, ''Good boy, George. Now give us an inaugural address.''
Worst of all, the champion of states' rights, the candidate who preached during the campaign that the federal government is flawed and that power should rest with the states and the people, chose to push his cause in the US District Court rather than the Florida judiciary.
He asked a federal judge to usurp from Florida officials their legal right to hand count ballots cast by local voters, proving himself to be a man not of conviction, but of convenience.
Either candidate could have shone in the last week. Either candidate could have said that there must be an accurate ballot count (by hand, across the entire state, if necessary), that he is willing to wait the proper time to assure it, and that he will heed the voters' decision. Neither has come close.
Republicans in general have become a shrill lot, fearing - perhaps rightfully - that the Democrats are trying to steal the election. Democrats, in turn, have pressed panic buttons that are unworthy of the day. The nation will survive a Gore defeat.
As time goes on, as the contretemps is lawyerized and politicized, the overriding question becomes not who wins, but who cares? Neither candidate will hold the respect of the public and the ability to impose a national agenda.
That's the good news. Here's the bad: In four years' time, assuming this race is resolved by then, we will have a rematch of these two men, which makes it all the more crucial for one of them - either of them - to rise to the occasion now.
Brian McGrory's e-mail address
is mcgrory@globe.com.
