Whether it is Bush or Gore, the next US president is unlikely to win in 2004 and may well live to regret fighting so hard for the prize

Boy George is just itching to get on with this presidency business. "There's issues in Israel right now that I'm looking forward to hearing about," he gushed away with almost touching innocence. Wow, what a pro this whizz-kid, 54, could yet prove to be in the White House. I now gather that when Jeb Bush, Boy George's kid brother and present governor of Florida (ie, currently a man with a lot to answer for) heard the television networks initially predicting a Gore win in his state on election night, he burst into tears in front of the whole clan of Bushies gathered to celebrate victory. Steely Mom Barbara had to comfort him.

What strikes me most amid the electoral debris, however, has been the reaction of the two candidates. Boy George, having failed to achieve the national anointment he assumed was his birthright, promptly developed a nervous skin complaint requiring a huge Elastoplast on his right cheek; both he and his running-mate, Dick Cheney, seemed physically to shrink while each unconvincingly purported to be getting on with his transition to power. Gore, on the other hand, showed nerves of steel: there was no sign of even an iota of vulnerability (although when I saw his wife, Tipper, in Washington a few days ago, she looked very fraught indeed). In fact, while Boy George in his Elastoplast looked a little like the prize-fighter who had come off worse the night before as he faced the media next morning, Gore looked positively presidential when he spoke in front of the White House on Monday.

I wrote last week that the results showed this is a divided country; but, as the electoral battle intensified, so it is now becoming a more polarised one, too. Polls show that slightly under a third of Gore's supporters reject the legitimacy of a Dubbya presidency, while 36 per cent reject the notion of Gore as the country's 43rd president. The conclusion is irrefutable: however bruised and battered and lame a presidential duck Bill Clinton may be when he leaves the White House as president for the last time next 20 January, his successor is likely to be in even worse shape. If Boy George moves in, he will never stop hearing that his opponent none the less won more votes across the country, and that Kid Jeb fixed Florida for him; if Gore makes it, he will be told he stole the election from Boy George by a legal sleight of hand.

The 43rd president will then have to deal not just with a polarised country, but with two wings of the 107th Congress that mirror it precisely. In the House, the Republicans will end up with a slim majority, but there are enough renegades willing to vote with the Democrats to render that fairly meaningless for either man; and the Senate will be so split down the middle that the Democrats will be insisting on virtually equal footing with the Republicans when it comes to important Senate committee chairs. "The new president will have to combine the skills of Harry Houdini and King Solomon," says a Republican.

Here, we come to the rub. Gore is an unpopular man on Capitol Hill - a distinguished biographer told me last week that the choice before America's voters was between a "moron" and a "prick" - and hardly has stores of goodwill stacked up in the House or Senate, even among his former Democratic colleagues. The Senate Democrat leader, Tom Daschle, 47, is an unassuming man on whom Gore can rely. But his Republican counterparts such as Trent Lott in the Senate and Tom DeLay in the House would be determined to wreck Gore's presidency; neither is over-endowed intellectually, but each has plenty of spite and spittle.

You might assume that, in contrast, Boy George would have it made with these fellas, but - with all three legislative wings controlled by the Republicans - they would press for gung-ho right-wing policies that Dubbya would find impossible to get through the moderate rump of Congress. Boy George, indeed, would need every ounce of the non-partisan, healing abilities that he claimed in the campaign he would bring to Washington; it is highly unlikely that he would be able to deliver on his central campaign promise, a $1.3trn tax cut. And if he hopes to appoint right-wing Supreme Court Justices who oppose abortion, he would be equally unlikely to have those appointments ratified by Congress.

Likewise, that same moderate rump would not let Gore get away with his much-ballyhooed promises to improve Medicare or provide free prescriptions for the elderly; Congress would almost certainly block funding, so that he would be unable to implement many of the domestic policies that were central planks of his electoral platform. "Either one of these guys is going to have to do a lot of healing," says the Democrat strategist Paul Begala (who played the part of Boy George when Smug Al was preparing for the presidential debates).

The presidency may thus be a glittering prize that neither man is able to resist, but either may end up deeply regretting it; with the economic downturn already in progress and interest rates rising, the likelihood is that, in four years' time, neither Boy George nor Smug Al will be looking good for re-election. Previous close winners have invariably lasted only one term: in cases where the president failed to win the majority of votes (John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888), a new president was elected after one term. Hayes was known as "His Fraudulency" and was able to govern only after promising to stay for just one term; to Henry Adams, he was a "third-rate non- entity, whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one". (Does that remind us of any candidate in 2000, I wonder.)

Much is made by the Republicans, meanwhile, of Richard Nixon's magnanimity in yielding to Jack Kennedy in 1960, when Kennedy won by a total of just 118,574 votes (including 121 magically conjured up by the late Mayor Daley of Chicago in a ward where there were only 43 voters). But that misses the point: even if he had asked for recounts left, right and centre, Nixon would still easily have lost to JFK on electoral college votes.

But there is another major difference between the dilemmas facing Boy George and Smug Al and the one facing Nixon 40 years ago. In those days, domestic matters hardly surfaced on the political map; almost the sole issue concerning Americans was the cold war and the supposed threat from the Soviet Union. Nixon correctly calculated that, to aid his presidential chances for later, he should get behind Kennedy in such doom-laden scenarios as the Cuban missile crisis. Nowadays, there are no equivalently emotive issues with which to unite behind your political foe.

The truth, therefore, is that the 43rd presidency of the US has become a deeply poisoned chalice which both men would do better to avoid. Each party now has to turn its mind to Congressional elections in 2002, when the battle for the control of Capitol Hill will once again be in full spate. For the 2004 presidential elections, it is hard to see either party welcoming back whichever man doesn't make it to the White House in January; morons and pricks don't make great presidential candidates, as the American people have shown us succinctly. And whether either man could succeed in the presidency itself is even more doubtful.

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