GLEN ELLYN, Ill. - From its faintest stirrings two years ago to its early tests in prairie caucuses and mountain primaries, from the high-tension debates of October to the desperate campaigning in the final November hours of the contest, the 2000 presidential election has remained bitterly, frustratingly close.
And when this campaign - more a competition between the personalities of Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush than between their policies - is over only two days from now, the bitterness and the frustration are not likely to disappear. They almost certainly will grow.
When the stakes are high and the choices stark, Americans make up their minds easily and crisply. Their verdicts in 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered a New Deal from the government, and in 1980, when Ronald Reagan offered a new approach to government, were unambiguous. Both Roosevelt and Reagan put America on a new course and displayed decisive presidential leadership.
But when the differences are muted and when the personal trumps the political, Americans agonize and temporize. Their selections of John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), John F. Kennedy (1960), and Jimmy Carter (1976) in five remarkably close personality-oriented elections prompted even more rancor in Washington.
A close election is likely to render the country more difficult than ever to govern. One principal reason: Though the country may not be exceedingly enthusiastic about its choice on Tuesday morning, about half the country is going to be disappointed about the result on Wednesday morning.
''That makes it very hard for the newly elected president to have a successful presidency,'' said Sidney M. Milkis, a University of Virginia political scientist who studies the American presidency.
These closely contested elections have not turned out to be inconsequential events, however. Many of them launched the nation on important new paths, and some of them were precursors to decisive elections that truly did change the country's course.
In the short term, however, there are more preconditions for frustration embedded in the final days of the 2000 election than at any time in the modern era.
Not only is the election for the White House too close to call, but the final shape of the Senate and the House also defy prediction the weekend before the election. A new president elected with a slim margin of victory almost certainly will confront a new Congress where only slim majorities prevail.
A newly elected president who wins in a close race, who enters the White House with less than a majority of the vote, who prevails in the Electoral College but who loses the popular vote, or who - and this is possible in 2000 - has all three of these serious political handicaps, will have had a weaker showing in many congressional districts than the lawmakers who will represent those districts in the House.
The result is that virtually no member of Congress will be grateful to, or dependent upon, or afraid of, the new president - a president who himself will be able to claim no mandate.
''The president who is elected in this race will not be in a strong position,'' said David R. Gergen, who advised Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Reagan and Bill Clinton. ''He will have won because he wasn't Gore, or because he wasn't Bush. He'll have a presidential victory but not a political victory - and that's a recipe for a president who will have to work very, very hard to get the country behind him.''
The difficulty of governing a country from that position was foreshadowed last week by the candidates' campaign schedules, which showed them playing on each other's turf, and by their closing pitches, which were remarkable mostly for the similar themes they struck, the similar language they used - and for the internal contradictions of their appeals.
On one day last week, Bush campaigned in Minnesota, which the Republicans have carried only once since 1960, and in Iowa, which the Republicans have lost in the last three elections. That same day, Wednesday, Gore made two stops in Florida, where the GOP nominee's brother is the governor.
The candidates' remarks underlined not only the closeness but the contradictory messages they are delivering in the final hours of campaigning.
Here in DuPage County, a suburban Republican redoubt, Bush spoke of the great pride and prosperity in America and, in a mix of change and continuity that is unusual on the political stump, then counseled his listeners, ''Help is on the way,'' adding: ''There's a better day ahead for America.''
A day earlier, in Tampa's Lykes Gaslight Park, Gore spoke in one sentence of setting America ''on a new path'' and of his determination to ''continue the prosperity.'' In that same speech, he said, ''I believe all Americans created this prosperity,'' an implicit recognition that individuals, not the government, spurred the remarkable economic boom of the 1990s, and then quickly added, ''all Americans should share in it,'' invoking the government tool of targeted tax cuts to spread the wealth.
Both men strived to credit the nation's working people for the nation's prosperity, both said their tax cuts would help the nation's middle class families, and both used the phrase ''You ain't see nothin' yet.'' A reporter who listened in on both men couldn't avoid the conclusion that he was listening to the political equivalent of stereo speakers.
Many of the close elections like this one have been resolved by a factor difficult to describe and equally difficult to avoid: a sentiment more than a conviction, an intuitive feeling about which candidate was more nearly imaginable in the White House. In 1960, for example, the nation chose Kennedy, who is remembered more for the liberalism of his remarks as president than for the conservativism of his appeal as a candidate, over Vice President Richard M. Nixon in a campaign that had two candidates from a new generation but with vastly different personal styles.
Many of President Kennedy's signature initiatives, including his tax cut and civil rights bill, did not win congressional approval in his lifetime. They were passed by Congress after the relentless badgering of a master legislator, Lyndon B. Johnson, a former Senate Majority Leader who succeeded Kennedy after the assassination in 1963.
Other presidents who prevailed in close, personality-driven, contests faired poorly in the White House.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, for example, was elected only after the five-way campaign of 1824 produced no majority in the electoral college. Adams, who had taken only 31 percent of the popular vote, prevailed in the House, and then appointed Henry Clay, the House speaker and one of the presidential contenders, as Secretary of State; the ''corrupt bargain,'' as this extraordinary episode was called, made Adams president but doomed his presidency.
''Not a single section of the country rallied to Adams's agenda,'' wrote the historian John Patrick Diggins, ''and his administration confronted a wall of massive indifference.'' Four years later, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who had won a clear plurality with 41 percent of the vote in his first match with Adams, cruised to the White House with 56 percent of the vote.
Hayes, an Ohio governor, lost the popular vote in 1876 to Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, but a series of electoral disputes sent the election to a Congressionally appointed commission, which voted on party lines to hand the election to Hayes, the Republican. The new president's plans for civil-service and education reforms were never realized and in the midterm elections of 1878, the GOP lost control of the House. Hayes is remembered for what the historian James A. Rawley called ''the setting of exemplary Christian goals, followed by the achievement of less than exemplary results.''
Former senator Benjamin Harrison of Ohio won an Electoral College majority in 1888 but lost the popular vote to the incumbent, Grover Cleveland of New York. A reform-minded president, Harrison failed to protect voting rights for blacks in the South, though he did preside over approval of the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act.
Carter defeated Ford in 1976 by only two percentage points, but his administration got off to a bad start when he targeted the pet water projects of influential congressional barons and only got worse when he failed to win a national consensus to face the challenges posed by the energy crisis and by the hostages in Iran. He was defeated in 1980 by Reagan.
Voters in 2000 have changed their minds several times, and as the election approaches there are few guideposts, only bewilderment.
''If Clinton hadn't done what he did in his personal life, Gore could have run on the Clinton record,'' said William Leuchtenberg, a University of North Carolina authority on the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. ''He wouldn't have had to distance himself from the president. But he can't. The election would have been a lot different if it weren't for Monica Lewinsky.''
No election follows the course of any past election; each has its own character and rhythm. Even at the end of this campaign, the dominant figure (aside, of course, from Clinton) is Gore. And yet there is just a strong a likelihood that the winner will be Bush and that the vice president will be forgotten by history, even if Bush's administration follows the pattern of frustration set by his predecessors in elections that were close and dominated by personal factors.
''This election is baffling,'' said John Bond, a political scientist at Texas A & M University. ''The fundamentals - peace and prosperity, a popular sitting president - suggest that Gore should be way ahead now, and he's not. There is no real explanation for why Bush should be in the position he's in. If Bush wins, political scientists will study this election for years.''
