Things were happening of the sort that don't hold news conferences. The sophisticated corruption of one candidate and the frat boy corruption of the other were deeply eroding voter interest in either. Supporters and news commentators didn't help with their implications that the pair enjoyed sovereign moral immunity--telling voters that "everybody does it" when really only a small handful could get away with it.

There had also developed what a psychologist might describe as the obverse of mass psychosis, a biologist might call a virus of virtue, or a physicist might call a phase transition of the soul. If you were in none of these professions, however, maybe it felt most like those moments when you turn the car around in a driveway, finally admitting you have taken the wrong road. More and more Americans had that feeling.

Where it began, nobody knows; there were too many bubbles when the pot started to boil.

There was, for example, the bar where a voter first said the words that would become an election year fad -- a beer glass lifted to the toast, "This one's for us" and everyone at the table responding in kind, first with their beer and later at the election booth.

There were the union leaders who publicly toyed with the idea of endorsing Nader as a way of putting pressure on Gore, but whose temporary political tactic had become a lasting political principle in the minds of many members.

There was the farmer looking at the box of cereal in the supermarket and realizing how little some other farmer had received for what went into that box.

There was the teenager who would say later: "I told my friends, like let's start a revolution and they were like 'nah, we've got too much homework' and then one day someone was like 'how?' and so we started."

There were the posters cropping up at colleges around the country announcing post-election parties with popular bands, the admission to which would be a ballot stub or a "I Voted" sticker.

There was the Christian fundamentalist who realized that it was sometimes better to disagree with an honest politician and than agree with a dishonest one.

There was the black mother who had voted Democratic all her life realizing that it was Democrats who had taken away her income support and sent her son 200 miles away to a privatized gulag for a minor drug infraction.

There was the liberal who had listened to Democrats tell him for eight years that Clinton was the best president their political party could ever hope for. And so he left the party.

. . . There was the couple who wrote the Green Party, "Our families have been union organizers, civil rights activists, peaceniks, all our lives. . . and we voted the Democratic ticket. We agreed with Mr. Nader, but believed 'he can't win.' . . . It needs to change and the change begins with us, so after all these years, we will vote the Green Party ticket. Every journey begins with that first step."

Nader and the Green Party somewhat belatedly noticed that the crowd running ahead of them was their own campaign. They came to realize that it wasn't so much a better platform they had to offer, but a better way of thinking about and dealing with such things, a way that had once been a natural part of American democracy but which had been systematically destroyed by a politics maniacally devoted to creating anger, division, and demons.

Americans didn't want just the right answers but a better way to discover them. Alone among the candidates, Nader had the courage, decency, honesty and imagination to help it happen . . .

As the campaign went on, America slowly began rediscovering itself, feeling better about itself, and being less angry with others. It was no longer obsessed with hidden dangers but began thinking about long-concealed possibilities. It could even think of the future and smile . . .

And so on election day America gave itself another chance, using nothing more revolutionary or sophisticated than a change of heart, and a trust in instinct over propaganda, self-interest over spin, decency over power, and a vision that now saw the future as a frontier rather than as a mandatory sentence . . .

All it required to be true was for people to think something they had not thought for a long time, to decide that the past was over, to refuse to be hustled and cheated anymore, to try a new road, to think and dream for themselves ­ just as was supposed to happen in a democracy -- and then to tell others what they thought and dreamt, giving the others courage to try the same thing . . .