he close counts, the raw hour, the wafer-thin majorities in Congress, the double reversal of fortune in Florida, a concession made and retracted - election night 2000 was little short of surreal. And in the clear light of morning, there is no clear light. Regardless of which candidate claims this muddled mandate, the American people have revealed themselves at the turn of a new millennium to be cautious, temporizing, hesitant about veering toward any ideology - a nation holding its breath.
Both Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore campaigned from the middle, and the mandate, if it can be called that, will be to govern from the middle. The purest expression of this centripetal force is the possibility that the popular vote will accrue to one candidate while the determining Electoral College tally will go to the other.
Perhaps it is fitting that the voters seemed incapable of making a strong statement this year. It is safer to keep close to the ground when the winds of change howl. We have been swept up in a technological revolution few of us understand and even fewer can predict or control. We celebrate the Palm Pilots and medical advances but fear the environmental and moral effects of genetic engineering.
The Cold War is over, and our enemies are less obvious, requiring a foreign policy that is far more nuanced. Our economic good times are accompanied by unease about the trade-offs with family and leisure time.
In the end, the Bush-Gore campaign boiled down to one central question: What good is government? Bush wants a limited, decentralized government that cedes authority to the individual and pushes policy decisions to the states. Gore supports an activist government that wades into society's troubles. While we favor Gore's view as necessary to assure fairness and order in an indifferent market, it seems the voters declined to embrace either approach.
There remains a deep strain of mistrust of big government, even in liberal Massachusetts, where voters approved a deep tax cut and rejected a health care initiative that would have injected government more directly into the medical business. Both the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries rejoiced yesterday as stock prices rose in anticipation of a Bush victory, since he would be less likely to regulate either sector.
At the same time, voters said Tuesday that they did not support privatizing whole swaths of the public realm. The Republicans in Congress will need to think long and hard before they turn over Social Security to the stock market or commercialize public education.
Election 2000 is a national place-holder, less like a bookend on the century and more like a bookmark.
