Their campaigns have promised grand strides, but their presidencies are far more likely to deliver halting half-steps.
Rhetoric aside, here's the reality: Neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore seems poised to win a victory broad enough to be called a mandate. And no matter who prevails, in Congress the spirit of divided government will persevere.
At best, Bush could emerge as the first Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower to have GOP majorities in both branches of Congress.
At worst, Gore could face a Congress controlled, as it has been for the last six years, in both houses by the opposition Republicans.
But short of a late-breaking wave, the reality is that the margin in the presidential race is likely to be so close, the House and the Senate so evenly divided, that either Bush or Gore will have to govern from the center and move cautiously on their agendas.
''It is not a big change election,'' says Thomas Mann, a senior fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. ''It is a time of steady as she goes, keep the prosperity going, don't make any dramatic departures, because neither the country nor the Congress is ready for that.''
In the end, Election 2000 will probably look a lot more like Election 1960 or 1968 - years that brought new presidents (Kennedy and Nixon) but hardly a mandate for a dramatic new direction - than Election 1932 or 1980, in which deep discontent gave a massive victory to newcomers (Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan) who promised a sharp break with the status quo.
It's not that Bush and Gore have failed to offer starkly different plans of action. From Social Security to tax policy to health care to education to foreign policy, this has been a campaign of significant differences.
Yet the debate hasn't galvanized national sentiment in favor of either candidate. Instead, they are like becalmed sloops in frantic search of a breeze, drifting rather than sailing toward the finish.
''The odds are overwhelming that whoever wins the presidency is going to win it by a very narrow margin, and maybe just a plurality,'' says Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter.
That alone will make it hard to chart a new course. It's even possible that Gore could score an Electoral College victory without winning the popular vote.
Neither Kennedy in 1960 nor Jimmy Carter in 1976 had much luck translating narrow popular victories into significant congressional success - even though, in both cases, their own Democratic Party controlled both branches of Congress.
The struggle for control of Congress is just as tight. Two days out, most analysts doubt the Democrats will win enough of the 34 Senate contests to gain control of a body where Republicans currently hold a 54 to 46 edge.
Thus only President Bush enjoys a good chance of having a Congress in his party's hands. If so, ''that may generate some hubris problems,'' says Mann. ''There will be pressure from conservative activists to go full speed with his tax policies and Social Security plan - and if he does, there will be a lot of problems on Capitol Hill given the narrow congressional majorities.''
But if Mann counsels a cautious beginning, William F. Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, thinks a new president of either party must move boldly out of the blocks to maximize his power.
''My advice would be to fight early in the term to consolidate the political power of a new president,'' Weld says. ''After that ... go over to the conciliation side, because all the power brokers in Washington have their own bases and they don't enjoy having their noses rubbed in things.''
The best-case scenario for President Gore appears to be divided control of Congress, with Democrats retaking the House, something that will happen if they score a gain of six seats.
That would be important; having one sympathetic branch to tee up a president's agenda is far better than facing two hostile chambers.
Still, the reality is that ''neither man will have an easy time of it given the makeup of the Congress, which reflects real divisions within the American public,'' says David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union.
By Rothenberg's analysis, whichever party wins the House will probably have no more than a four-vote margin, while as few as two votes could divide the Senate.
''Those kind of margins are not recipes for major legislative action in the next Congress,'' he says. ''You need a real working majority to get anything done and a handful of seats is not a working majority.''
Even a working majority can be tough for a president if the issues are vexing. Although President Clinton had a 40-vote cushion in the House and a seven-vote margin in the Senate at the start of his term in 1993, his deficit-reduction plan passed by only two votes in the House, and Gore had to cast the tie-breaker in the Senate, where the vice president votes in cases of deadlock.
Clinton's congressional support evaporated altogether under the weight of his controversial national health insurance proposal, creating a backlash that helped bring the Republicans to congressional supremacy in the 1994 election.
Yet some observers are not convinced that a narrow majority or a divided Congress is prescription for inaction. After all, the next president will approach the Congress not with cod-liver oil but with cotton candy.
''The first major bill is likely to be a tax cut, and whether it is Al Gore's $500 billion tax cut or George Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut, there will be no problem getting votes for either,'' predicts US Representative Martin Meehan, a Lowell Democrat.
But the sheer thorniness of other issues will require forging a bipartisan consensus, says Carol Cox Wait, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, itself a bipartisangroup.
''On big issues like Social Security and Medicare reform, you have to build a coalition from the center out,'' says Wait.
Which means that in a Congress with delicate balance, management style will be important. Bush calls himself a conciliator who would seek to end the partisan rancor in Congress and work with Democrats. Gore styles himself as a fighter, someone ready to wage a pitched battle on behalf of the working and middle classes.
We've seen both styles in presidents from the last two generations.
Faced with a Republican congressional majority, Harry Truman won the nation's sympathy as a world-class scrapper. Confronting a Democratic House, Reagan vowed that if lawmakers couldn't see the light, he'd make them feel the heat.
By contrast, with large Democratic majorities, both FDR and Lyndon Johnson used consultation and cooperation to achieve spectacular legislative victories. President Clinton tried both approaches, arriving in Washington thinking that Congress, like the Arkansas Legislature, would pitch in to help him succeed, then adopting a tougher style after the Republicans took over and left his agenda to languish.
It's hard to see Gore, who lacks both Clinton's charm and his more-in-sorrow-than-anger mode of argumentation, doing any better at rallying Congress. Certainly President Gore will need to do much more than Clinton did to cultivate Republicans. (As a graduate of both the House and the Senate, Gore will be better positioned than Clinton to reach out.)
US Senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Maine Republican and cochair of the Centrist Coalition, says that as a freshman House member, she heard far more from Carter's legislative office than she has as a senator from Clinton's.
That lack of outreach persisted even after she let first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton know about the failing, Snowe says.
''You always understood you were going to have your differences, but I got the feeling the White House wasn't making a good-faith effort to work across party lines,'' Snowe says. ''It just wasn't there. It didn't exist.''
And if the Texas governor wins?
''A President Bush will spend more time on Capitol Hill than any president in history,'' predicts Ron Kaufman, an informal adviser who served as political director for Bush's father when he was president.
Maybe so. But others, who say Washington's rancorous riptide is running at levels seldom seen in the 20th century, wonder if Bush's professed modus operandi can still the crosscurrents.
''If Bush is elected and can recover the earlier era, that will be a major achievement,'' says Joseph Ellis, an author and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. ''I don't think he can, though.''
Yet after a long campaign, let's end on an upbeat note.
If neither Gore nor Bush is likely to find it easy going, the adversity may produce a better leader.
''Growth occurs when things are difficult,'' says psychologist Joyce Brothers. ''It's not just the man making the job. The job helps make the man.''
