The confusion at the end of the presidential contest simply mirrors the confusion of American society, writes Andrew Stephen from Washington

What a depressingly long night it turned out to be. I got through my last Typhoo teabag as I waited in vain for the presidential election result, increasingly feeling that what I was watching was not the world's most powerful nation flexing its great, glorious wings of democracy, but a thoroughly tawdry spectacle - debased by the expenditure of no less than $3bn and the sheer venality and cynicism of both presidential candidates.

The 2000 election will go down in history not just for its frenetic closeness and fiddles, but for its relentless emphasis on focus groups, the infinitely adaptable policies that resulted, and a nihilistic insistence that victory was all that mattered to either side. It was richly appropriate that, as the NS went to press early on Wednesday afternoon, definitive victory still could not be claimed by either side.

The electors always faced an appalling choice: competence combined with obnoxiousness (Gore), or incompetence allied with, well, at least a little charm (Dubbya). We knew all along that whichever presidential candidate screwed up least would be the ultimate victor. And, in the immortal words of Ralph Nader quoted here last week, only Al Gore was ever capable of beating Al Gore - even against Boy George, the most inexperienced man ever to offer himself for US president.

Whatever the final result in Florida - where, as I write, a recount looks set to decide the destination of the presidency - Gore has managed to pull off the near-impossible by his failure to win comfortably, after he had helped to preside for eight years over the most booming economy in history. If the vice-president has lost Florida, it is probably because Nader snatched crucial votes from him - a notion widely sneered at only three or four weeks ago but, as always, predicted here first.

Yet what this bizarre election showed more than anything else, I believe, was the sheer extent of the divisiveness emerging in this country. Certainly, given the exquisitely divided electorate (Boy George, whether or not he wins a majority in the electoral college, lost the popular vote to Gore), neither man is able to claim that he has a clear mandate. Equally, the sheer confusion and unpredictability of the Congressional results shows that the traditional US political map is no more.

Blacks have always voted differently from whites. Now, we have men pulling electoral levers differently in the booths from women (those levers are one of the electoral distinctions between the UK and US that fascinate me most), and even married people vote quite differently from the unmarried (53 per cent of married voters went for Boy George, but only 38 per cent of singles: don't ask me why). Men preferred Boy George by nine percentage points, while women liked Gore better by a margin of 10 per cent - a wider gender gap than four years ago, when Clinton apparently had women voters swooning.

Protestants went for Bush by 63 to 34 per cent, while Jews voted Democrat by 81 to 17 per cent. Four-fifths of voters believed Boy George to be the more "honest and trustworthy" of the two major presidential candidates, yet three-quarters thought Gore understood the issues better. Large cities (those with a population of more than half a million) voted for Gore by a rate of three to one, while small towns and rural areas went decisively for Dubbya.

Down in Florida, where Al Gore spent the final hours of his campaign trying to convince the elderly that their social security payments and prescription drugs would be endangered by Boy George, exit polls showed that a clear majority (around 60 per cent) rejected Gore's views. And where ballot issues were concerned (the mini-referenda that are a regular feature of American elections), the acceptance of same-sex marriage went through easily in Nevada, but was rejected just as decisively by Nebraska; the legalisation of pot was rejected in Alaska, where it used to be legal, but supported clearly by Colorado. In Missouri, a dead man was elected to the Senate - Governor Mel Carnahan, whose name was still on ballot papers although he was killed in a plane crash last month.

Am I making my point: that this is a confused and divided nation that will now be horribly difficult to govern? For the first time since the days of Eisenhower - in 1952, to be precise - all three legislative wings of government (the Presidency, Senate and House of Representatives) are now likely to be controlled by one party, the Republicans: all this after a two-term Democratic president left an economy that should have ensured easy victory to his vice-president and party allies. But Bill Clinton's only certain legacy is to have bequeathed what may well prove to be a traumatic term in the Senate for his wife (who won New York, as predicted here last month against consensus wisdom).

So how did Gore achieve defeat (or near-defeat?) instead of what ought to have been certain victory? Shortly after he entered the electoral fray, he employed the feminist writer Naomi Wolf (at a cool $15,000 a month) to advise him how to behave like an alpha male - a disastrous decision, which led to the painfully clumsy attempts to appear as a strong, domineering man, and which almost certainly cost him the presidency. He harrumphed, he sighed, he strolled threateningly into Boy George's territory during the debates; all this turned people off Gore.

Partly as a result of this, his relentless energy - unlike Clinton's in his triumphant campaigns of 1992 and 1996 - ended up as a liability. He stubbornly refused to let Clinton loose, even though the president is always an electoral winner; Gore preferred, if he could, to lose the election on his own. So millions of Americans went instead for the more likeable Boy George, lounging on his feather pillow and showing off his monogrammed cowboy boots as he grinned and virtually revelled in his ignorance.

And Gore failed, too, to understand a lesson learned the hard way by poor Michael Dukakis in 1988. Then George Bush Sr launched a series of ruthless attacks on his opponent's character; Dukakis, believing he was keeping his nerve and not lowering himself to the same grubby level, refused to respond. Instead, he kept hammering away at issues, as Gore was doing as late as last Tuesday, although it had become clear that Dubbya was gaining when he began to stress "character" and "trustworthiness" as personal assets. Gore's message was frequently lost in a flurry of jargon and statistics as he jabbered away about social security one minute, prescription drugs the next. The exit poll analyses showed us that it did not work, even with the most vulnerable elderly voters of Florida.

By allowing their characters to be attacked in this way, both Dukakis and Gore made themselves vulnerable to Bush Sr and Jr, when they should easily have won. In the past fortnight, Gore plunged himself into deeper trouble because he was hardly ever off the nation's television screens - highlighting his unfortunate propensity to fib and exaggerate. Boy George, by contrast, hardly ever deviated from his stump speech, and refused to make himself available for most media interviews.

And so, after the extraordinary flip-flops of this strangest of elections, we must contemplate the possibility (perhaps certainty, by the time you read this) that next 20 January, Boy George will be anointed President Bush II, while the best-known senator in the country will be one Hillary Clinton, with Bill Clinton as America's new, handbag-carrying Denis Thatcher. And Al Gore, if he has lost the first election of his life, will have to join that woeful list of presidents-who-never-were.

It is almost as though this new, divided America never wanted there to be a winner, isn't it?

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