Al Gore struggled for survival in the nation's overtime presidential election on Tuesday, while George W. Bush, projecting confidence about a victory, said he hoped to "seize the moment" after taking office.
"Obviously we've got a lot of work to do," Bush told reporters outside the state Capitol in Austin. He said he expected to begin making personnel announcements in short order, although Cabinet appointments are likely to wait until Gore's final legal challenge has been rejected.
The vice president was in Washington, pinning his hopes on his appeal of a ruling Monday that reaffirmed Bush's narrow certified victory in Florida and refused to order any recounts.
Gore's running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, met privately with Democratic lawmakers.
"We have always said that the Florida Supreme Court will be the final arbiter," Lieberman said.
That's where Gore was headed, after Judge N. Sanders Sauls' ruling on Monday on the vice president's unprecedented legal challenge to Bush's 537-vote win in Florida.
On Tuesday, the Florida Supreme Court agreed to hear Gore's appeal Thursday of the ruling that upheld Bush's statewide victory.
Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, was also on Capitol Hill, meeting with the GOP rank and file.
He said Bush's transition was "up and running and operational now."
After weeks of fierce post-election combat, Bush and Cheney both seemed to be going out of their way to soften their tone, wishing, perhaps, to grant Gore the room to bow out.
Cheney, who urged Bush's rival on Sunday to concede, told reporters, "I didn't come today with a message for Vice President Gore."
Bush, speaking on Monday, said the vice president is "going to have to make the decisions that he thinks are necessary, and I know he'll put — the interests of the country will be important in his decisionmaking, just like it would be in mine."
There were other developments in a post-election drama unlike any other.
A federal appeals court in Atlanta heard arguments in election-related cases. The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature marked time, prepared to call a special session to appoint a slate of electors loyal to Bush — but hoping it wouldn't be necessary.
And lawyers for Gore and Bush faced a midafternoon deadline to file legal papers with the state Supreme Court in yet another case, this one returned from the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday with instructions for the state high court to clarify a ruling it had made earlier.
In Austin, Bush received his first intelligence briefing from the CIA. He was meeting later Tuesday with his prospective national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and working on transition decisions on what Bush called "a busy day."
It's "important to show the American people this administration will be ready to seize the moment," he told reporters on his way to his office at the Texas Capitol.
Increasingly, it appeared as if the state Supreme Court's disposition of Gore's appeal might settle the contested election.
Gore lawyer Ron Klain, on NBC's "Today" show, said that Sauls made "some very clear errors" which he predicted would be reversed by the Florida Supreme Court.
"What needs to be done," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America," is "to count those 14,000 votes that have been uncounted or miscounted."
"They won. We lost. We're appealing," Gore lawyer David Boies said succinctly on Monday after Sauls rejected the vice president's legal arguments point by point.
House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., emerging from the meeting with Lieberman, said the Democratic party was united behind Gore's appeal.
Speaking to a battery of top-dollar lawyers for both sides as well as a national television audience, Sauls ruled that the evidence did not establish "any illegality, dishonesty, gross negligence, improper influence, coercion or fraud in the balloting and counting processes" in the Florida counties where Gore sought such recounts.
And he said that while the record shows voter error and/or less than total accuracy in regard to the punch-card voting devices utilized in Dade and Palm Beach counties, Gore failed to show a "reasonable probability" that a recount would alter the statewide result.
The judge refused to sweep aside Bush's 537-vote certified victory and begin courthouse counts of what Gore said were missed votes that had been rejected by machines in heavily Democratic counties.
Sauls' ruling was one of numerous legal developments during the day in an election that has spawned more than 40 lawsuits, including two that were being argued Tuesday in Atlanta federal court. The suits by Bush supporters ask that any Florida presidential election results using hand recounts be thrown out.