T A TIME in my life when I was framing buildings and not sentences, a boss carpenter trying to straighten out what I had just bollixed up grunted that I'd done the thing ''bass-ackwards.'' And so it is with the stalled presidential election. The great national teeter-totter won't stop teetering and tottering. That cliche of the '90s - ''closure'' - mocks us still.
But we've been going about the resolution backwards. We've been putting all the pressure on the very bottom layer of the political system - the amateur vote-counters of 67 Florida counties.
The professional deal-cutters, the politicians who get the big money, have been hollering unhelpfully from the sidelines, tossing banana peels at the enemy, encouraging the rowdies to complain that the other side is trying to steal the election.
Not till the Florida Supreme Court entered the picture Monday with dignity and sternness and trenchant questioning has Florida seemed anything but a swamp of partisan poaching and backwoodsy backstabbing. The seven justices injected a sense of probity and insight into this examination of the election's entrails. But so vast is the gulf between Republicans and Democrats that not even the seven wisest judges since Solomon could allay the suspicion among many millions of Americans that is sure to eventuate.
This is the gathering ''we-wuz-robbed'' caucus, and it will be equally noisy, irksome, and obnoxious, no matter from which camp it emanates. The ugly brawl over counting absentee military votes that came in without postmark shows how quickly this thing can turn very dirty.
The Bush camp's eagerness to cry foul and denounce the Gore camp as unfit to govern rekindles the rank odors of the dreary campaign past. Wafting northward from Florida are ''the poisoned sneers of artificiality,'' in the felicitous phraseology of Jerome K. Jerome. You've not heard similar guff from the Gore command post. The attempt to delegitimize Gore in advance of a final determination of the balloting is a nasty development, but an appropriate coda to a campaign spawned in impeachment's yeasty juices.
Like most Americans, I think there should be a recount; it should be as fair as possible; it should involve all 6 million ballots, in all 67 counties, by one set of uniform standards for chads, postmarks, and such. Then we could award Florida's 25 electoral votes, and name a president-elect, and get on with Christmas, New Year's, and the inauguration on Jan. 20. Anything short of full and fair invites recriminations and political bull-slinging.
What will worsen the situation is the attempt to shut down the process by freezing out a full and fair recount the Bush camp fears will erode its thin lead. Bush's 930-vote lead was trimmed by 160 when Gore picked up that number in Monday's limited recounting, so Bush's lead was down to 764, if the recount gains are allowed.
There are respected voices from each side of the partisan chasm suggesting we recount all of Florida's votes and proceed from that basis. Senators John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, and Check Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, are both heavyweights within their own caucuses. They agree on the basic point: All the ballots should be recounted, not just ones in selected counties.
It is not at all certain that Gore would win with a statewide recount. But the Democrats clearly feel their chances would improve. The state law in Texas, if applied to Florida, would allow such recounting.
All the wrangling has so far occupied media and public attention. But at the end of the day, it is the leaders assured of a place in Washington's next government who will have to work with what the Florida system coughs up on the beach. We have not been served well by the leaders of the Congress and the people of influence in both parties. They have allowed rancor and pettiness to ebb and flow. The fog of partisanship has obscured the obligation of wiser heads in both parties to reach an accord.
There is much that could be agreed upon in Congress. Deals can be struck that would oblige each side to make concessions. The GOP would agree to make no move to outlaw abortion, say, for two years, if the Democrats agree to seek no wider curb on guns until after the next congressional election in 2002, which may give us a better indication of the nation's will.
Both sides could agree to make minimal changes in Social Security and reach common ground on health insurance, in a form of coalition government that can be brokered by leaders in the House and Senate. You could have Cabinet appointments from the opposition party, creation of bipartisan commissions and committee structures in Congress. There are hundreds of constructive steps that could be taken to diminish the likelihood of gridlock and deadlock. This would be leadership from the top, not chaos and conflict from the bottom.
David Nyhan's e-mail address is nyhan@globe.com.
