All done bar the counting

NASHVILLE - His bid for the White House hanging in the balance, Al Gore yesterday embarked on a final 30-hour whirl through four crucial states, before returning to Nashville, capital of his home state of Tennessee. Just one burning and unanswerable question remains: will tonight be a triumph or a wake?

With polls showing him closing to within one or two points of opponent George W. Bush, the Vice-President claimed again and again that he had the vital momentum in the final hours of the campaign.

"We're feeling the enthusiasm of the crowds out here," he proclaimed at his first stop in Iowa, "and the enthusiasm of our people who are keeping their fingers on the pulse in their local communities."

And local communities are precisely where this tightest of modern elections may be settled. Gore cast the contest in the mould of 1960, when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by 114,673 votes, or 0.17 per cent of the popular vote, an average of one vote per precinct.

"I want you to get me one more vote per precinct. And then one more," he said to hundreds of union supporters gathered in the pouring rain at the John Deere tractor plant at Waterloo, Iowa, a midwestern farm state that Bill Clinton won comfortably four years ago but that is now a complete toss-up.

Despite a schedule over the past few weeks that would have crushed younger men, the 52-year-old Vice-President looked remarkably unscathed. If he was staring at defeat and the probable end of a lifetime's ambition, only the pleading urgency in his voice betrayed it.

In the past 48 hours, he has honed down his message to the barest essentials - lashing Bush for a proposed part-privatisation of social security that would endanger pensions, reminding voters of the economic prosperity the Clinton-Gore era and, at every stop and at every moment, imploring his supporters to get out and vote.

Only after a final election day rally early today at a 24-hour restaurant in Tampa will he return to his home city of Carthage to cast his vote, and then come to his headquarters to await, powerless, the verdict of the night.

- INDEPENDENT

* The Herald Online's coverage of voting in the US presidential election begins at noon Today.