An historical poker game

It has come down to this. The struggle for the US Presidency is now a cross between a game of poker and a game of chicken - the domestic political equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis in which the stakes are the highest imaginable: the world's most powerful elective office.

It has come down to this. The struggle for the US Presidency is now a cross between a game of poker and a game of chicken - the domestic political equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis in which the stakes are the highest imaginable: the world's most powerful elective office.

It is an utterly compelling spectacle, played out in the ballot boxes and courts of Florida, and later, perhaps, in the fine print of the US constitution.

Ultimately however - and most gripping of all - this election will not be decided by the law, nor even by the constitution but by two human beings, only one of whom can win. The USconstitution is a majestic arbiter, but it takes people to make constitutions work. A week after the desperately close 1960 election, Richard Nixon met John F Kennedy to assure him the result would not be challenged.

Sooner or later, surely, something similar will happen. Maybe neither will back down and the conflict will reach the Supreme Court. But either Mr Gore or Mr Bush will have to give up his claim to be the 43rd President. There will be no consolation prize, apart from a place in history as the man who did the decent thing and perhaps saved the American system.

But no hero for posterity was volunteering yesterday. "We want the true and accurate will of the people to prevail, and that means letting the legal system run its course," proclaimed William Daley, Mr Gore's campaign manager. To which Jim Baker, Mr Bush's man in Florida, retorted with threats of his own. "Let the country step back and pause and think what's at stake here. This may be the last chance to do that. There's no reasonable end to this process if it slips away."

In fact, the system is working. The problem is America's all-pervasive impatience, the lust to know everything instantly. "One is enough," Churchill famously said of majorities, and we are getting close to that now. Not only in the Presidential contest, but in the Senate and the House of Representatives, this election has been excruciatingly close.

The revised Bush majority in Florida is 327, equal to 0.005 per cent of the vote in the state - although absentee ballots are likely to enlarge it.

But Florida is not the end of the matter. The outcomes in Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Wisconsin were wafer thin: why not recounts there? And if the courts in Florida are to be involved, why not elsewhere where the results are close and someone has a complaint to register, an axe to grind? Thus Mr Baker's warning yesterday: a legal fight in Florida (where an election has never been voided) would open a Pandora's box.

And among the great and the good (including The Washington Post, which endorsed Gore) an informal consensus is emerging; let the Florida recount run its course, until Friday when all absentee votes arecounted. Then whoever is ahead wins. Sure, the Palm Beach county ballot paper was not a masterpiece of design clarity, but it was approved by both parties beforehand, and nobody is suggesting fraud.

The only snag is, America has a long history of ornery judges taking history into their hands. And if one does, and the process runs all the way to the Supreme Court, the use of the legal process for political ends - so visible in the Clinton impeachment - would be complete. If the warnings that America is on the edge of aconstitutional precipice have any meaning, it is that.

Meanwhile, both sides play with public relations fire. Mr Bush exudes arrogance, behaving as if the election were already won. Mr Gore is near to appearing a bad loser. History may be in the making, but neither campaign is showing much sense of it.

However, let us not lament absent statesmanship, but feast on the twists - these have been the most exciting US elections: a Presidential one where the brother of one candidate governs the state on which everything depends; a Senate race won by a dead man, and - delicious irony - the son of Richard J Daley, whose chicanery in Chicago helped JFK win 40 years ago, lecturing on the purity of democracy.

In the end though, even after a week that shook America, the edifice is still standing. For all the lurid and unnerving headlines, the US is an immensely stable country. "This is the most nervous moment of my life," George Bush senior, "but democracy will go on." And it will. But how ? Propelled by the lawyers or by the politicians?