There is an iron law of US campaign politics. It says that the only way to win is to have higher numbers than the other guy.
The only way to improve your numbers is by television advertising. The only way to get the advertising slots that reach the voters is by paying for them.
And the only way to pay for them is to raise millions and millions of dollars.
Nothing that has happened in the 2000 election will have dented the US political class's faith in this iron law. This was an election won and lost by the most intensive television advertising campaign ever in the key states.
Political campaigners, like generals, always prepare for the next campaign on the basis of the endlessly re-examined lessons of the last one.
So the big lesson that the American professionals will draw from the 2000 campaign is not that the political money mountains need to be brought under control. It is that campaign funding will have to increase more than ever in 2004. Campaign finance reform - the one great populist cause to emerge in the 2000 campaign - can simply go hang.
The second great lesson the professionals will learn is just as cynical. They will conclude that a winning campaign is all about better organisation, stricter discipline and never being knocked off course by the media, events or voters.
This closest of modern US elections was also one of the least participative elections of modern times. It was won by professionals deploying professional thinking, techniques and resources to ensure that voters did the one thing required of them - vote. It was ruthless and controlling, and this morning's outcome will only confirm the professionals' belief that their way is the only way.
It was a campaign in which the messages were crafted by strategists and pollsters working with focus groups composed of middle-of-the-road people who were not interested in politics. It was a campaign in which the Internet became not the transforming participative democratic forum that many had hoped but a superbly effective weapon to add to the armoury of those who are directly involved - organisers, lobbyists, pollsters, journalists and activists.
The main candidates, Mr Al Gore and Mr George W. Bush, worked from a campaign playbook which kept them away from unvetted crowds, avoided unscripted events and above all insulated them from probing media.
The candidates promoted their families and their relatives as surrogate campaigners as never before. They sought the company and endorsement of celebrities as never before. And they avoided the press.
For the modern candidate, the political press is an enemy every bit as dangerous as the opposing candidate. Mr Gore in particular pursued a strategy of avoiding contact with journalists, especially those travelling with him on the campaign trail.
Mr Gore gave not a single press conference from the day he left the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in August until polling day yesterday. Mr Bush, having initially made himself available to his own travelling press, abruptly ended that approach after he mangled the word "subliminable" as he struggled to explain the use of the word "rats" in a subliminal frame of a campaign advertisement in early September.
After that, he was off limits, too.
Not that the candidates did not want to get their message out. They did, but on their own terms. So they went on comedy programmes and children's television, on late-night talk shows such as Letterman and Leno, and soft-focus daytime interview shows such as those of Oprah Winfrey and Regis Philbin. But they never went on the political programmes and they never took questions from political reporters.
Their focus was unerring and unsleeping. They wanted to control the media agenda. When they succeeded they were happy. When they failed they came close to panic, as both sides did at various times.
But this was not some new discovery. It is the essential condition of the modern political campaign, the "permanent campaign" as Sidney Blumenthal, then a journalist but now a White House aide, dubbed it in the 1980s.
In all things, the rest of the world looks to the United States for what is coming downstream towards it. Election campaigners in other countries have been glued to the 2000 election as they were to earlier contests, to learn new tricks, techniques and lessons.
They will all have learned what the American professionals have learned. That modern elections are won by money - which can only come from rich people. That modern elections are won by control - which can only be achieved by defeating the media.
And that modern elections are won by organisation - which ensures that voters do the one thing that fewer and fewer of them seem interested in doing. As democracy withered again, the campaigners celebrated another triumph.