ASHINGTON - The non-election of a president is giving new meaning to Washington gridlock.
From Capitol Hill to K Street, from the unoccupied White House transition office to the shops overstocked with inaugural gowns, the typical bustle that seizes this town when preparing for a new administration has been replaced by paralysis.
''It is all people can talk about - to the point of distraction - at a lunch or a meeting or a cocktail party,'' said Gregg Ward, a lobbyist for the Siemans Corp. ''It's as if they have to get it therapeutically out of their systems before they can move onto anything else.''
Normally, a transition would find Ward in overdrive, dashing off memos to corporate headquarters, adjusting strategies, recruiting Republicans or Democrats, depending on which party won power.
Instead, Ward said, ''everything is on hold.''
It's the same on Capitol Hill. Without certainty about who will occupy the White House or what the Republican-Democratic ratio will be in the new Senate, the lame-duck session of Congress is looking perilously like a dead duck.
Members of the House and Senate are supposed to return today and get down to the business of passing the outstanding fiscal 2001 spending bills and a 10-year, $240 billion tax-relief package. Instead, lawmakers are likely to agree only on a stopgap measure that would keep the government running through Thanksgiving and buy them the time to decide if they should cut deals now or stall until a new president takes office.
''Lame-duck sessions are never pleasant,'' said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. He suggested that partisan tensions sharpened by the presidential imbroglio will only make this one worse.
Representative Martin T. Meehan said it might be easier for this Congress to reach agreements, because the new House and Senate will be even more closely divided. But the Lowell Democrat doesn't expect that to happen.
''The truth is, we should have gotten the budget done before the election,'' Meehan said. ''But both parties felt the elections would determine whose priorites were right. Now, with things undecided, I don't think we are going to get very much done in the lame-duck session.''
Capitol Hill staff members with their hearts set on moving up to an administration or lobbying job also are immobilized. ''Gridlock has settled over the Capitol, there is no denying that,'' said Jim Manley, a spokesman in Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office. ''Not a lot of work is getting done because everybody is glued'' to the television.
Spokesmen for President Clinton say it's business as usual at the White House - except, of course, that the vice president is somewhat preoccupied with his future and the first lady is packing up and sorting through a mountain of resumes before heading to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Amid the political turmoil, the president is pushing ahead with official duties. On Saturday, he spoke at a groundbreaking ceremony for a World War II memorial on the Washington Mall, and yesterday he met with Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel at the White House. Today, he leaves for an economic summit in Brunei and a three-day visit to Vietnam.
But for many White House staff, including some who used their vacation to work for Gore in the final weeks of his campaign, these are difficult times, and emotions are raw. ''People here are exhausted, amazed, surprised, frustrated, disappointed, just like they are everywhere else in the country,'' said a senior aide to the president. ''They stand in front of televisions, listening to every report and shaking their heads.''
One bright spot, the aide said, is that departing political appointees will be able to collect unemployment insurance because they are being forced to resign. White House maids, cooks, butlers, gardeners, and Secret Service agents will keep their jobs, regardless of who's president.
And there will be plums for some; the next president will make an estimated 6,000 political appointments. The process can't begin, though, until he is elected. Last week, the director of the General Services Administration called each campaign to tell them the government would provide two floors of downtown Washington office space, hundreds of computers, more than $4 million, and a 30-person staff for the transition - as soon as one of the candidates is declared the winner.
In a single-industry city like this one, the wait for a president was becoming an obsession well beyond the White House and Capitol Hill. At the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank, scholars, pundits, lawyers, and consultants worried last week about what the future might bring.
''The theme was that we are now on the edge of a series of steps that could lead to an electoral abyss - the kind of electoral uncertainty associated with other countries around the world that we always assumed were different from us,'' said Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Washington office of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Several blocks away at the World Bank, Parmesh Shah was reading e-mails from election commissioners at home in India, who were commenting on that very thing and what looked to them like an electoral mess.
''My friends are amused and amazed,'' said Shah, who coordinates grass-roots participation programs, including overseas elections, at the bank. ''The Americans' vulnerable side has come to the fore.''
Don't tell that to the US military, which is marching ahead with plans for the inauguration of the 43d president, whoever it may be. For almost a year, federal agencies, city bureaus, and offices of the armed forces that coordinate the inaugural have been meeting to plan logistics for the 2001 festivities. Eventually, the president-elect will set up his own inaugural committee, which will need to raise upwards of $30 million for the event.
Letitia Baldrige, one of the city's GOP grand dames, is beyond perplexed at what she calls ''the tremendous sort of don't-do-anything'' pre-inaugural paralysis that has stricken the town.
''Things were well under way for George Bush's inauguration - people were making hotel reservations, ordering ball gowns, and now it's all on hold,'' she said.
The risk of a drawn-out process to elect the president, she said, is that the inauguration itself will turn out to be ''subdued and unglamorous.''
