ASHINGTON - Not only a close election. Not only a close election that comes down to the electoral votes of one state. Not only a close election that comes down to the electoral votes of one state that happens to be governed by one candidate's brother. Not only a close election that comes down to the electoral votes of one state that happens to be governed by one candidate's brother and also is itself split almost evenly.
No - this was an election with all of the above, plus claims of voting irregularities and confusing ballots, too.
These are thoroughly uncharted waters.
In this atmosphere of contention and confusion, no precedents guide the course, no procedures set forth the path.
In a country that defers many of its controversies to the verdict of an election, the result of the election itself has been deferred. In a nation whose majority-rule institutions sometimes obliterate the ambiguities of issues, the ambiguities now rule. In a culture that distills even its most meaningless conflicts into winners and losers, there is no winner and no loser.
The great election impasse of 2000 already involves a tangle of claims, laws, and tactics. Court arguments almost certainly will follow. These have a dynamic all their own. But the more important conflict embedded in this episode is even subtler.
Just as no defendant is promised a perfect trial, only a fair one, no society can ensure a perfect election, just a fair one.
But the dispute over whether Governor George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore ought to be granted the White House next January is a subtle test of at least three competing, perhaps even contradictory, forms of fairness.
There is, first of all, fairness to Bush and Gore themselves; despite the claims and counter-claims, the two are men of honor who devoted enormous energy and commitment to their presidential campaigns.
Then there is fairness to the voters, who deserve to have their ballots - democracy's most precious documents - counted fully and fairly.
And there is fairness to the system, which has its own demands, chief among them the responsibility to stay true to the great principles that underlie it.
Now, without any instruction booklet, without any single referee, Americans, their political leaders, and the men who seek to be their leaders have to try to honor these multiple expectations of fairness, or at least to take them fully into account.
In the meantime, the political system is in limbo. A deeply divided Capitol Hill doesn't know who will be occupying the White House at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Voters accustomed to swift resolution of elections do not know the identity of their next president. One measure of the institutional problems: The presidential campaigns are out of federal election money now that Election Day has passed, but neither side has access to federal transition money because it is not clear who will be conducting the presidential transition.
This is all occurring while sober figures, respected members of the political establishment, are tossing around contingencies unimaginable only a few days ago and, in many ways, unimaginable even now: the possibility that the chief justice of the United States might not swear in a president whose claim on the presidency isn't sound, for example, or a spate of lawsuits questioning the validity of the election but filed after the inauguration.
For consolation, we know that the nation will survive even this. Political crises have come and gone, each posing a particular peril to the system. By the time this one is over, the Electoral College and many of the assumptions of our politics may be swept away.
But for now, the atmosphere in Washington and in the two competing camps does not augur well for a swift or clear resolution of this crisis. Indeed, both sides seem at times to be looking more for a way to fight about this problem than to resolve it.
But slowly, clearly, the notion that this situation will not be ended quickly gains currency. And as it does, so does the likelihood that a nation that transformed the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the impeachment of President Clinton into TV spectacles might be on the verge of creating the first media sensation of the 21st century.
