My impression of Morsi is that he's an unimaginative hack, who'll follow the official line laid down by the party's leadership. During the campaign, he tacked toward a hard line on imposing sharia, but a lot of that was to lure the Salafis away from Aboul Fotouh, a more reform-minded Islamist who also appealed to some liberals and secularists.

Now that Shafik is his only rival, Morsi can afford to look and sound more moderate, and cast the runoff election as a choice between the new democratic Egypt and a return of the old military-dominated regime. 

But the Brotherhood should take as a wake-up call the fact their vote numbers fell by about half since the election that handed them a parliamentary majority. Egyptians seem unimpressed with their performance during the transition period, and uninspired by Morsi. The Brothers' organizational advantage managed to get him to first place, but not by very much.

Nearly half of Shafik's second-place votes probably came from Coptic Christians, who were mistreated by Mubarak but fear the Brothers could be worse. The other half would have come from remnants and beneficiaries of Mubarak's old party, including military brass.

The secularists and liberals who sparked the revolution now face a terrible choice: vote to let the Brotherhood consolidate power at both the legislative and presidential levels, or enable the old regime to reassert itself -- and pretend that the revolution never happened.

I think they'll swallow hard, bite their lips, and vote for Morsi. But like the headline says, I've been totally wrong before.

Logic always favored the Brotherhood candidate (whoever it was), especially in a field of 13 candidates of all imaginable stripes. But the very factor that gave them their parliamentary majority -- their rigid internal discipline -- came close to costing them a spot in the presidential runoff. Their hit-or-miss political stances, and flip-flops on such issues as running a candidate, convinced a lot of people they were not ready for prime time. The movement's conservative, near-calcified leadership failed to win the trust of non-Islamist revolutionaries, Coptic Christians and even the fundamentalist Salafis.

It went without saying that a hard-line Islamist like Abu Ismail couldn't win the presidency. The main Salafi leadership, to everyone's surprise, turned his disqualification into an advantage by endorsing Aboul Fotouh, a "reform" Islamist and ex-leader of the Brothers' youth wing who had for long reached out to secularists and liberals. A uniter, not a divider. But also, hope and change.

Aboul Fotouh fell short in the vote count -- in part because the Copts opted not to trust any Islamist, no matter how moderate, and backed a remnant of the old regime instead. Aboul Fotouh's spread on the political spectrum also got cut into by the late surge of Hamdeen Sabahi. A leftwing populist in the Nasser style with a bare-bones campaign, Sabahi managed to come within a couple of percentage points of the second-place finisher (he's even demanding a recount).

So we've basically got a four-way split of Egyptian society: institutionalized Islamism, Mubarak lite, leftwing populism, and a move to bridge those gaps and amalgamate those tendencies into a coherent hole. I still think the fourth way, Aboul Fotouh's, is what Egypt needs. I also think he and Hamdeen Sabahi will both be players in the country's politics for years to come. 

If Shafik loses, as I suspect he will, he'll become a historical footnote. Morsi , if he wins, is also a transitional figure. He'll try to consolidate power to permanently set Egypt's future path, but that could well backfire. The revolution has suffered a setback, but democracy hasn't been killed. It may take a few years, but Egypt will find its balance of moderate Islamism, modernism and leftist populism. Caveat: I've been wrong before.