USTIN, Texas - George W. Bush tried to act as though it were just another Sunday, but even his pastor would not let him forget his plight.
''We continue our prayers for the political process in this country and those most closely affected by it,'' associate pastor Ann Beaty told the congregation at Tarrytown United Methodist Church yesterday. ''May your patience be their patience.''
The prayer, slipped in between passages for the sick, was a fitting reminder of the bizarre existence Bush and Al Gore now share, unable to escape even for a minute an agonizing wait.
For Gore, the 12th day of appearing calm meant going for a jog and attending church at the National Cathedral in Washington, where the Rev. Peter F. Grandell issued a slightly vaguer reminder that ''Jesus calls on us to wait and persevere and trust.''
Neither candidate commented publicly about the undecided election, which takes a new direction today as the Florida Supreme Court takes up whether the state must include manual ballot recounts.
Instead, Bush and Gore made brief appearances before the cameras, waving from afar and always with a smile, continuing to maintain demeanors that aides consistently decribed as upbeat.
Talking about the task at hand fell to subordinates, especially Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman, who made a marathon round of appearances on all five Sunday morning TV talk shows.
With Republicans accusing the Gore campaign of trying to overturn an election that has already been decided, Lieberman said he and Gore ''and a lot of people in Florida want to make sure that in this closest election in American history, every vote for president, every vote is counted, and counted fairly, accurately and legally.''
''We want the next president, whoever he is, to take office with a sense of legitimacy about him - without millions of the American people who supported the other candidate saying, `We were robbed,''' Lieberman said on CBS's ''Face the Nation.'' ''And I think the way to do that is to do everything we can to have every vote counted.''
Lieberman, in the service of his theme, even took issue with local Democratic officials in Florida who tossed aside 1,527 military ballots sent in from overseas. In many cases the elections monitors said they did so because the ballots were missing postmarks, but Republicans have accused Democrats of throwing votes away on minor technicalities, an allegation Lieberman said should be taken seriously. Yesterday he urged vote counters to ''give the benefit of the doubt'' to votes cast by military personnel.
''If [the vote counters] have the capacity, I'd urge them to go back and take another look,'' he said. ''Al Gore and I don't want to ever be part of anything that would put an extra burden on the military personnel abroad.''
He continued, ''The vice president and I would never authorize and would not tolerate a campaign that was aimed specifically at invalidating absentee ballots from members of our armed services, and I've been assured that there were more absentee ballots from nonmilitary voters overseas that were ultimately disqualified.''
Defense Secretary William Cohen and Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, both Republicans, took to the airwaves to express concern about the military ballot-counting process. Cohen, in a news conference in Kuwait following his meeting with the emir, Sheik Jaber Ahmed Sabah, said that ''the last thing we want to do is make it harder for those wearing our uniform and serving overseas to be able to cast a ballot.''
For the second day, the Bush campaign focused its attacks on the manual recount process underway in several counties, questioning its validity in advance of the Florida Supreme Court hearing today. Montana Governor Marc Racicot, an increasingly familiar public face in the Bush campaign, said that Democrats were applying ''changing standards'' to the manual recount. He also said Bush's opposition to the hand counts is not inconsistent with a provision of Texas law that deems hand counts more reliable than machines.
Bush, who ran four miles at daybreak yesterday, did not appear in public again after returning home from church. His twin 18-year-olds are at home for Thanksgiving, his aides said, and many of his advisers, including running mate Dick Cheney, have left town for the holiday.
Gore, meanwhile, canceled a trip to Nashville to await the Florida Supreme Court hearing. Lieberman flew to Connecticut after his TV appearances to attend his high school reunion.
