The court cases decided yesterday in Florida were as muddled as anything could be in the close election for the nation’s next president. Though rulings earlier in the day from circuit courts suggested that it was time to begin the process of transferring power from one president the next and one party to the other, the Florida Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision reopens the election and the ensuing legal maneuvers for both candidates, at least until Tuesday.

The public’s patience throughout the post-election legal tangle has been great, but it was also reaching an end as the lawsuits, particularly from the vice president, seemed more and more desperate. The GOP strategy of delay and more delay with the hope of reaching Dec. 12, when the electors needed to be chosen, was effective; but its side was better served by an honest assessment of what the vote tabulation was capable of producing. The public learned that every vote doesn’t count, at least in the sense that each vote is added to a candidate’s column. Thousands of Florida votes will not be counted; no doubt many were added in the hand recounts that had no place in the total. Though the totals are listed down to the single digits, all they can really produce is something that might be called plausible electablity.

Given all that has happened in Florida since Nov. 7. George Bush’s count has had the greater plausibility. This is not much of a mandate; in fact, it is not a mandate at all except that the public is telling the next president, much as it, collectively, told an evenly divided Senate, that it expects cooperation and progress on some obvious areas – education, health care, the environment. And it is less interested in the latest spin on ideology than it is in seeing slow, steady progress on student test scores, the number of Americans with health coverage, a cleaner planet. Save the partisan palaver for your spare time.

Archconservatives, out of habit or, perhaps, nostalgia, will blame the current state of affairs on President Bill Clinton, and they will be right. More than any other politician in memory, President Clinton listened to what the public was saying, heard things that other leaders would take years to understand, and acted. He infuriated Democrats and Republicans for different reasons, but by planting himself in the middle of the political stream, he caught voter sentiment before voters had been to the polls.

Whether Mr. Bush ever gets a chance at duplicating this, as he has indicated he would, rests with the interpretive skills of ballot hand counters in various parts of Florida. The court, unfortunately, gave them little direction but to count only ballots were an expressed preference was “clear,” as the Florida Legislature indicated. What clear means, however, is something of a mystery.

Nevertheless, the Legislature should resist the temptation of settling this issue by choosing electors absent the new tally ordered by the court. Similarly, Congress should concentrate on finishing its spending bills and not try to impose itself on what becomes a more difficult situation by the day. If the public is to have any confidence in the outcome, the fewer governmental bodies between voters and the outcome the better.

There are further hurdles for Mr. Gore now that the state supreme court has immediately reduced the gap between him and Mr. Bush to fewer than 200 votes, not least of which is whether it is already too late for most voters to support his presidency if he were to pull ahead. And the vice president’s lawyers have the U.S. Supreme Court to deal with, a daunting challenge given that court’s grumble of a response when it considered a related issue last week.