their party. They raise their own money and they buy their own TV spots. They are individualist and often stroppy. Only the conservative ideologues of the 1994 generation have shown much cohesion, and they fight likes cats in a sack.
What is more, they have been seriously discredited by the impeachment fiasco. Congress"s intractability is often put down to "divided government", the fact that Presidents often face majorities in Congress of the opposing party.
If either Bush or Gore had won convincingly, congressional leadership might have become easier. As it is, we should look for few bold initiatives - except perhaps on campaign finance and even electoral reform.
Specifically, there will be voices calling for abolition of the Electoral College. With that exception, it is most unlikely that many Americans will see the election as making a case for any major constitutional reform.
Indeed, it has been striking over the past couple of days how many politicians and officials, on television, in the very act of admitting irregularities in the working of the system, go out of their way to assert the superiority of American democracy.
An eighteenth-century Constitution may have shortcomings in the twenty-first century. But few Americans are willing to say so. Hardest of all to say is whether the election result reflects any broad distemper in the political system.
Many years ago Robert Kennedy pulled a stack of dog-eared three-by-five cards out of the bottom drawer of his desk to buttress his argument to me that America was so divided geographically and ethnically that it could not tolerate a party system that was also divided by class, like the politics of most European countries.
Yet something like that is exactly what has happened. Before the civil rights movement of the Sixties, American party allegiance essentially rested on the Civil War, and on the impact of mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe a hundred years ago. Southern reactionaries were joined in the Democratic Party with Northern workers and liberals.
The effect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been to turn the South, for the first time, into a two-party system. Southern conservatives turned into Republicans, and in the process they turned the Republican Party into the conservative party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, while the Democrats, shorn of much of the Southern white vote, became the liberal party.
Yet politicians, needing to raise money from special interest groups because they depend on paid television ads to be elected, are nervous about offending business, and so they stick to the centre.
Voters are increasingly frustrated. Half the electorate is angry that the conservative revolution initiated by Ronald Reagan has been stopped in its tracks. The other half resents the dominance of corporate business. This does not explain the statistical stasis of the 2000 elections. But it does help to explain the new mood of bitterness and intransigence that will make it hard to resolve the dead-heat.