The unexpected decision of the Florida court -- No, the judges ruled, they would not instruct the recalcitrant county to go back and resume (re)counting -- injected a thrill of second thought into the Republican hierarchy. Thought had been given, and rhetoric aligned, to the Florida court as nothing more than a fighting division of the Gore cause. Jim Baker had declared judicial war at the august federal level, calling for federal intervention. Suddenly the court against which he was complaining entered the columns on the side of W.

It was a narrow decision, affecting the behavior of a single county. But that decision, denying Miami-Dade one more count of its voters, could prove critical; and now the Republican forces have to consider the prospects, not all of them gratifying, of squeezing into the White House.

John O'Sullivan, writing in National Review, has thrown much cold water on the unexamined passion for victory. He argues that the inauguration as president of George W. Bush, with a mandate so streaked by ambiguities, would actually affect his conduct as president. He would achieve presidential power but so attenuated by electoral anomaly as significantly to reduce it. A Republican mandate to rule looks pretty thin in the circumstances of November 2000.

During the week it was established that the GOP lost the Senate seat in Washington state, yielding the haunting prospect of a 50-50 Senate division which, before it could be organized on GOP lines, would have to wait for Dick Cheney to get over his heart troubles.

Imagine the scene when President Bush delivered the State of the Union address. As of Friday morning, there was some talk of Democratic ostracism of inaugural activity. This would be decidedly un-American -- hardly in the tradition of the resigned acquiescence of the party of John Quincy Adams making way for the bumptious Andrew Jackson.

But whatever formal concessions the Democrats come up with, they'd be protocolary in form. The dogged Democrat, convinced that his party was the victim of an anachronistic constitutional overhang 200 years old, would perhaps excusably deem it his sovereign responsibility to his country to get in the way of the young usurper from Austin, Texas. This could mean effective paralysis in achieving the kind of legislative progress on which the ultimate vindication of a Bush administration would depend.