ASHINGTON - An earthquake rumbled through the political world yesterday, shaking everything along its path.
It rocked George W. Bush's hopes that he could finally claim the presidency. It altered public expectations that the longest election in more than a century might end this week. It postponed, possibly even canceled, Vice President Al Gore's solemn moment of contemplation and concession. And it disrupted the customary tranquillity of the US Supreme Court, which again is being called upon to adjudicate a dispute over who should lead a rival branch of government.
For more than a month, politicians, lawyers, legislators and jurists labored amid the unbearable stress of the post-campaign period and the uncompromising scrutiny of history to bring Campaign 2000 to a decisive conclusion.
But now the answer to the simplest question in electoral politics - who won? - will require even more wrangling, even more recounting, even more time, even more patience.
And as the tension mounts, so, too, do the uncertainties - and the possibilities for struggles between competing parties, competing branches of government, and competing interpretations of the unlit corners of the Constitution.
In an age of apathy, the drama of the post-campaign period has been unceasing. In an age of irony, the twists of a plot that has no discernible resolution have been unexpected.
But the new drama that the American people are embarking on amid the winter holiday season was prompted by an irony that would be remarkable in any saga but this: It was a divided Florida Supreme Court that provided the decisive verdict.
The court decision came at the end of a day that once seemed to represent the possible end of the tortuous path of this campaign, not merely a way station. For the Bush team, it represented an eerie parallel to Election Night, when the Texas governor seemed to have won, but then didn't. For the Gore team, it represented a rerun of the fabled drive to downtown Nashville's War Memorial Plaza, when the vice president's need to concede seemed obvious, and then suddenly didn't.
When circuit court judges Nikki Clark and Terry Lewis, in a joint ruling earlier yesterday, refused to throw out absentee ballots in two Florida counties, they seemed to bolster the Republicans' belief that the end was near, both for the vice president and for the long election. But the Florida Supreme Court had different ideas. So, too, did the Florida Legislature, which set in motion the possibility that it might send its own slate of Bush electors to Washington if Gore wins the latest, and presumably last, set of recounts.
Now what is unknown far outweighs what is known.
No one, for example, knows whether there are sufficient Gore votes in the uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade or other counties to put the Democrat ahead. No one knows whether so-called ''undercounts'' in counties that Bush carried by a heavy margin might actually bolster the Republican's slim advantage. No one knows whether all the ballots can be counted before the Dec. 12 deadline for selecting electors. No one knows whether that is a binding deadline. No one knows how Congress would respond to competing slates of electors.
No one knows how the American people will respond to the notion that the election of 2000 might well not be concluded until 2001.
Only one aspect of this election struggle remains firm. The Gore team still invests its hopes in counting more ballots and, as campaign chairman William Daley put it last night, respecting ''the will of Florida's voters.'' The Bush camp still invests its hopes in claims that the vice president is trying, as campaign counsel James A. Baker III put it an hour later, to use ''lawsuits to overcome the results of an election.''
And so the end is not near, the resolution is not clear, the president is not chosen. But, just as important, the tests on a political system whose greatest virtues only five weeks ago were its clarity and its stability are not over.
Yesterday's temblor disturbed the fragile equilibrium of the presidential election, shattering the consensus that was slowly settling across capital and country: that the time for closure was finally here. It took every thing that was known and believed about this extraordinary overtime election, shook them violently, and propelled the country into the unknown and the public into disbelief.
