ASHINGTON - All politicians imagine this moment: The prime-time address to the nation, flags in the background, so many people hanging on their every word, so very much hanging in the balance. But never could Al Gore have imagined that his moment in the spotlight of history would be remotely like this.
His five-minute nationally televised speech was not a summons to a great crusade, nor a response to a grave national security threat, nor even a grace note resting lightly over a moment of national achievement.
Instead, it was a plea of a man caught in a wrinkle of democracy and feeling wronged by politics.
Last night Al Gore was fighting - for his political life, for his historical reputation, for the electoral redemption he believes should be his.
He was fighting for a redemption that can come only if a nation that prefers instant results to suspense will grant him a stay of execution; only if party leaders who dislike him will grant him another week of public support; only if his Republican rivals can't prevail in their plan to begin their presidential transition before there is a presidential election conclusion; only if courts wary of intervention in politics will dare to wade into the messiest election in a century and a quarter.
For Al Gore, the terrible ifs accumulate.
He is standing at the edge, a man with little to lose, a career politician with no place to go, nothing to do, if he loses. He was reared to be president - '' We bred him for it,'' his father, the first Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, once said of his son and the prospect of high office - and now he believes, just as firmly as Governor George W. Bush believes, that he has won the election and deserves the office.
And he is convinced, just as firmly as the Texas governor is convinced, that this moment - November 2000, not November 2004 or some other time - is his moment.
He ran for president once before, in 1988, and he clearly wasn't ready; the campaign sputtered before coming to an unsightly end in the ethnic wars of New York.
He retreated, and studied, and prayed, and waited for his moment, and when it came, after two terms as vice president, he campaigned with a relentlessness that may have surprised even him.
He ran this year on the jet stream of a hot economy and American power abroad, and he was as ready as anyone could be. But the awful truth of the November election - and, indeed, the awful truth of the events that led to his televised speech last night - is that the nation still wasn't fully ready for him.
So last night he made one last campaign speech, one last spirited try to rally the troops, searching for the words that would give others the courage of his conviction: that he won this election and still has a chance to be awarded its prize.
But he was also a man trying to pull off one of the most difficult, inherently contradictory, moves in politics, or in life: to win at all costs, but without any cost to his stature and image.
So he spoke of a quest that was ''more important than who wins,'' and he argued that a vote is a ''statement of human principle.'' Those are views that the people who know Al Gore know that he believes.
But they were used as blunt weapons in the quest for the job that the people who know Al Gore know that he wants more than anything, the presidency.
For months Gore watched the president he served under, Bill Clinton, gather his strength and his arguments, fight against foes better organized, all in the battle to avoid impeachment.
He saw a president fight a historic battle in a long-forgotten corner of the Constitution - there hadn't been an impeachment since 1868 - and he learned his lessons well: Do not give up. Fight on. Carry the struggle beyond the narrow confines of the battlefield.
That is what Gore is doing. He is appealing to the public and its sense of public spirit, saying that ''our Constitution matters more than convenience.''
But, unlike Clinton, he has no ally in public opinion; a Gallup Organization Poll for USA Today and CNN taken this week found nearly three Americans out of five disapproving of the vice president's decision to contest the Florida election results.
Al Gore had five minutes of the nation's time last night, a mere breeze in the national wind - and a measure of how little the Gore team wanted to trifle with Americans' time 20 nights after the polls closed.
He had his moment, and his flags, and the best argument he could make, and now it is up to the courts and the public. Election Day was three weeks ago. Decision day for Al Gore could come any day now. ''Let the people have their say,'' he asserted last night, ''and let us listen.'' The whole world is watching - and listening.
