The best way to come to terms with the US election is to think of it as the Eurovision Song Contest. The songs may be excruciating, but the counting of the votes is gripping.
After a depressingly bland campaign, in which neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore gave a convincing impersonation of the leader of the free world, the election itself turns out to be utterly intriguing. In managing to supply the drama that the candidates failed to muster, the voters have come up with the perfect image of the relationship between American society on the one hand and American politics on the other. While both presidential candidates tried to appeal to what they imagined as a vast centre ground, the voters came up with a much more honest image of a deeply divided society.
Left to themselves, Al Gore and George Bush would have very little trouble reaching a consensus on the government of the US over the next four years. For all the efforts to present themselves as outsiders, each is a hereditary princeling of the political establishment. Bush's people were not far wrong when they joked that, even though he lost Tennessee, Gore had still his home state - Washington DC. But George Walker Bush's attempts to run as the anti-Washington candidate were themselves quite ludicrous. Though there are genuine differences between them, the two men share so much that if the dead-heat result forced them to share the spoils of office, they could certainly do business with each other.
To a large extent, once each had secured his own electoral base, both men ran similar campaigns, each focused on winning the support of swing voters in the middle ground. The election was fought on micro-political issues like the structure of the social security system and plans for controlling the cost of prescription drugs. Neither tried to tell the American people a big new story. Neither articulated a grand narrative that might replace the lost Cold War saga of the Shining Republic versus the Evil Empire. The underlying assumption in both campaigns was that America was a contented, even smug, society.
The voters knew different. They simply didn't buy the conventional wisdom that wrote them off as a nursery full of well-fed, sleepy babies. If all they cared about was keeping the long economic boom rolling quietly along, Gore would have won by a landslide. If they viewed the election simply as a beauty contest in which the nicest guy got to be president, Bush would have romped home.
Instead, they split right down the middle into two mutually hostile camps. They delivered a vivid reminder that the US is not a big, happy family revelling in peace and prosperity, but a troubled society that has become increasingly polarised between two different cultures. However poorly and reluctantly Bush and Gore may represent those cultures, the voters had no intention of allowing them to slip away into a gentle consensus.
Though you would never guess it from the election campaigns, the divide between conservatives and liberals in the US now runs very deep. Because it doesn't look like a traditional right/left split, and doesn't even fit into a recognisable conflict between religiously motivated people and secularists, it tends to be dismissed as a mere matter of lifestyle choices.
The fault-line that runs through such apparently diverse issues as gun control, abortion, prayer in school, attitudes towards homosexuality and the use of death of the death penalty, generates profound passions and produces real tremors in American society. The electoral stalemate is one of them.
One way to gauge the extent of this cultural fissure is to consider attitudes towards Bill Clinton. In principle, as a right-wing Democrat who has dismantled the welfare system and supported free trade, Clinton ought to be a relatively comfortable figure for most Republicans, and something of a hate-figure for the trade unions and minority communities. Instead, he is despised by conservatives with a passionate contempt that has been matched in modern times only by liberal attitudes to Richard Nixon. Conversely, most African-Americans and many trade unionists don't just tolerate him, but love him.
The reason for this is that while Clinton crossed the old left/right divide, he still stands right on the new cultural faultline. And try as Al Gore did to keep Clinton out of the election, the war that is best embodied in the completely different responses that Clinton's very name evokes in every part of the US was always going to be fought out on this battleground.
To a passionless election, the voters brought these pre-existing passions. Almost in spite of himself, Gore found himself pushed agonisingly close to the finishing line by the very Old Democratic alliance that he has made a career out of distancing himself from - organised labour, African-Americans, ethnic minorities and pro-choice women. And, however much he tried to balance the tribal rallying cry of "conservative" with the nice qualifier "compassionate", Bush, if he wins, will be stuck with a hard right-wing agenda.
Assuming he makes it, Bush is in for a very tough time. With the two camps in US society having fought each other to a standstill, the conventional wisdom now suggests that an outbreak of polite civility is on the cards. Much more likely, however, is that Bush will be caught in the crossfire of the same hostilities that engulfed Clinton in the Lewinsky affair. That extraordinary saga was not about Bill Clinton`s sex life, which was hardly more disgraceful than that of large numbers of politicians on both sides. It was a struggle for moral authority, waged by conservatives who felt very deeply that, although he had won two elections, Clinton had no moral right to be President.
Now, if Bush squeaks home, the situation will be reversed. With a minority of the popular vote, his moral authority will be weak. In those circumstances, the logical thing for him to do would be to tone down the rhetoric of truth and honour and stay away from moral crusades.
But the divisions are such that he will not be able to do so, and his problem is that there are more skeletons in his cupboard than in the entire Clinton family vault. The late revelation of a drink-driving conviction in the last days of the campaign was but a tiny foretaste of what may lie in store.
Things are not going to be pretty.