THE American presidential election came to a carefully choreographed end on the evening of December 13th, five weeks and a day after it was supposed to be completed. Both Al Gore, the Democratic loser, and George W. Bush, the new Republican president-elect, were, as expected, at pains to strike bipartisan poses and to be seen to reach out to the other side after an extraordinarily bitter legal and political battle over the counting of votes in Florida, upon which the entire election turned.

Mr Gore, in particular, was under pressure to be gracious, and he rose to the occasion, pledging his support for Mr Bush and telling his disappointed supporters to do likewise. "I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country," Mr Gore declared.

	Bush: reaching out to Democrats

Soon afterwards, Mr Bush gave an equally gracious acceptance speech from the Texas House of Representatives, ground zero for bipartisan co-operation in his state. "Our nation must rise above a house divided," said Mr Bush. "Republicans want the best for our nation, and so do Democrats. Our votes may differ, but not our hopes."

But how long will this spirit last? Not long, judging from history. When the first President Bush, George Herbert Walker, gave his acceptance speech 12 years ago, he said “We didn’t come here to bicker”. That attempt to change the tone in Washington lasted about five minutes. Of course, that time, the election lasted only a day as well.

This time there will be lingering bitterness at the strange way the election was decided. Mr Bush finally won only through an extraordinary and controversial intervention by the US Supreme Court, where a judicial brawl broke out between conservative and liberal justices; and even many observers usually sympathetic to the court are convinced that the decision to stop the counting of votes in Florida was partisan. Many black voters, in particular, are angry about the way they were treated at Florida polling stations. The standard-issue rhetorical reconciliation of Mr Gore’s and Mr Bush’s speeches is unlikely to be enough to paper over such cracks.

And yet the dream of bipartisanship may have to become reality if Mr Bush’s new administration is to get anything done. Often overlooked in the past five weeks is the fact that the divided vote and the bitter arguments about it have had a surprisingly narrow public resonance. One of the most extraordinary episodes of American political history has just played itself out before a surprisingly calm public: most polls showed that barely a quarter of the population deemed it a crisis. The doubt over who “really” won Florida makes any confident political judgment almost impossible. So the candidates and their supporters are going through the motions partly because the election has given them little of substance to get to grips with.

Above all, nobody in Washington, DC (and very few in Austin), thinks the election of 2000 represents a fundamental change. Mr Bush did not win because he better understood some tectonic force at work. Mr Gore did not lose because he ignored one. (The vice-president ran a poor campaign, but that was largely a matter of poor tactics and limited personal appeal.) Americans voted for a change of leader, not a change in direction. Together with the closely divided Congress and the lack of an obvious mandate, this will undermine any expansive political agenda. The ferocious post-election contest has somewhat reduced the policy ambitions of American politicians.

	Gore: God bless George W.

In the short term (that is, before inauguration day on January 20th), the narrower view of politics should help Mr Bush overcome any damage to his legitimacy caused by the manner of his election.

On the face of it, this might seem to undermine one of the main advantages that a Bush presidency offered, which was that it would be less destabilising than a Gore presidency, largely because Republicans were more bitterly opposed to a Gore victory and more inclined to perceive it as illegitimate had it happened. The Supreme Court’s ruling might yet end up affecting the way voters see Mr Bush’s victory in Florida, harming his presidency and making the balance of Mr Bush’s advantage narrower. But for the moment, this has not occurred. A poll taken the day after the Supreme Court verdict found that 80% of Americans said they were prepared to accept Mr Bush as a legitimate president (although only 52% thought the Supreme Court made the right decision and 42% disagreed with it).

Fears of a real legitimacy crisis, in the sense of a substantial section of the country refusing to obey presidential orders by appealing to a competing source of authority, have vanished. American presidents tend to get their authority less from direct popular mandate than from the powers of the presidency itself and from their behaviour in office. Mr Bush will be no exception.

Over the next few days, Mr Bush will announce his first cabinet appointments (favourites are Colin Powell as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser). There will almost certainly be a Democrat or two in the cabinet as a pledge of bipartisan good faith. Mr Bush will go to Capitol Hill to deflate the policy hopes of his conservative supporters and to sound out Democrats. And next week he meets Mr Gore to speed up the transition process, made all the more important because half of the normal period for it has already been used up by the post-election wranglings. All this will make Mr Bush appear, as he himself put it, “the president of every single American, of every race and every background.”

	Time to go

And Mr Gore? His widely admired concession speech set off speculation that he might try to run again in 2004. If Mr Bush stumbles, such a thing would not be impossible. Mr Gore is only 52 and won the popular vote in this election. But he is likely to face much tougher competition in the primaries then than he did this time, from the likes of Hillary Clinton and Gray Davis, the governor of California. More important, many Democrats blame Mr Gore for losing an election he should have won easily. There are few places for gracious losers in American politics.

From The Economist Global Agenda