WASHINGTON — It was not the end, not yet, but Monday's ruling in a tiny, crowded Tallahassee courtroom may have marked the beginning of the end of the nation's long millennial electoral melodrama.
Time began running out on Vice President Al Gore a week ago, when Florida certified a victory by his opponent, Gov. George W. Bush, with a ceremonial flourish. But even then, much of the country and most Democratic officials said they wanted to hear what the courts had to say about further manual recounts before starting to consider Bush the president-elect.
Now, time is an even more formidable enemy, and so is the law. As of Tuesday, exactly four weeks after Election Day, only a week will remain until Florida's electors must be definitively chosen under federal statutes. Gore's lawyers have still not persuaded anyone to order more recounts in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, the two big south Florida constituencies where they think the votes to erase Bush's ultrathin margin may lurk.
Monday night they asked the Florida Supreme Court to order such recounts. But that would involve overturning Monday's decision by Judge N. Sanders Sauls of Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee. That ruling swept aside the arguments of the Gore legal team with unusually brusque language, declaring that they had produced "no credible evidence" to shore up their case. It left the Gore camp not even a legal crumb.
David Boies, the top Gore lawyer, looked haggard when he left the courtroom, but he vowed to fight on, and he protested bitterly that Sauls had never even examined what Boies called "the best evidence" — the contested ballots. Some Democrats warned darkly that sooner or later, someone or other, operating under Florida's Sunshine Law, would gain access to the ballots and find solid evidence that the wrong man was in the White House.
Sauls' decision, a prominent Democratic lawyer said, "built a much steeper mountain for our side to climb, because reversing a trial judge's findings of fact is much harder than reversing him on points of law."
The high court in Florida, composed of six Democrats and an independent, sided with Gore once before, extending the time for earlier manual recounts. But it has also sided with Bush by refusing to order a recount in Miami-Dade County and by refusing to order a new election in Palm Beach County because its "butterfly" ballot was confusing.
Even if Gore should prevail this time, it is hard to see how the high court can read briefs, hear oral arguments (if it chooses to) and issue a ruling in time to recount tens of thousands of votes before Dec. 12.
So where else can Gore turn? He can hardly appeal to the Florida Legislature, in which Republicans have almost a two-thirds majority. He has argued from the beginning that the dispute is a matter for the state, not the federal courts, so there would be problems in fashioning a new legal attack by way of the federal courts.
One tiny opening may be offered by a case involving absentee ballots in Seminole County, near Orlando. A Gore supporter there has charged that a Republican election official illegally helped supply addresses and other data for absentee ballots and has asked that 15,000 of them be thrown out. It is an awkward case for Gore, however, because he is fighting on other fronts to include rather than exclude questionable ballots.
That Gore is still clinging to dwindling hopes is not surprising, given his situation. He clearly won the national popular vote, amassing more votes than any other nominee except Ronald Reagan. He may end up with more electoral votes than any losing candidate in American history. If present figures hold, he lost Florida, and the election, by fewer than 1,000 votes out of 6 million cast — and he and many of his supporters will no doubt argue for years that more people went to the polls intending to vote for him than for Bush, only to be frustrated by problems of various types with voting machines.
Asked whether it was time for Gore to concede, Bush demurred, commenting that "that's a very difficult decision for anyone to make."
Nonetheless, some Democratic strategists expect Monday's developments to begin to produce defections in Democratic ranks — if not among the most prominent officials, like members of the Clinton Cabinet and senior senators, at least among junior officials and rank-and-file Democrats. That never happened on any significant scale during President Clinton's impeachment crisis, and solid partisan backing helped the president to survive.
"Gore needed a win to keep us all on board," a Democratic consultant said, "and he didn't get it."
The dispute over Florida has taken many unanticipated turns since Nov. 7, and it may surprise the experts once again. But Monday night at least, it looked to many people in the capital as if the denouement might not be far off.