l Gore announced last night that he would not run for president in 2004, apparently ending a political career that thrust him into the middle of one of the most disputed presidential elections in American history, while recasting the coming contest among the half-dozen Democrats seeking to take on President Bush.

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Mr. Gore, the former vice president, said in an interview on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that he was intent on seeing Mr. Bush unseated, and believed he could be defeated. But Mr. Gore suggested that he might not be the strongest challenger in what early polls show would be a difficult task for the Democratic Party, because of the way he lost to Mr. Bush in 2000.

"I personally have the energy and the drive and the ambition to make another campaign," Mr. Gore said, speaking slowly and firmly in an eight-minute interview taped yesterday afternoon at CBS studios in New York.

"But I don't think it's the right thing for me to do," he continued. "I think that a campaign that would be a rematch between myself and President Bush would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would in some measure distract from the focus on the future that I think all campaigns have to be about." [Excerpts, Page A19.]

Mr. Gore, who mocked himself in an appearance on "Saturday Night Live" the night before, said he viewed this decision as effectively ending his career in elective politics. "I make this decision in the full knowledge and awareness that if I don't run this run this time, which I'm not going to run in 2004, that's probably the last opportunity I'll have had to run for president," he said.

For Mr. Gore, the 54-year-old son of a senator who devoted nearly half his life to trying to become president, the announcement was the end of what friends have described as two of the darkest years of his life. Mr. Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but lost the presidency because of a vote count in Florida that he and other Democrats assailed as illegitimate. It was an embittering experience that was the prime reason many Democrats thought Mr. Gore would and should run again, a point of view that Mr. Gore rebutted last night.

For many Democrats, Mr. Gore was viewed as the strongest candidate in the field, if only because he was so well known and enjoyed what early polls pointed to as wide support among Democratic primary voters. As a result, his decision also scrambles the state of play in the Democratic presidential primary, forcing nearly all of the Democrats who have been considering a run to rethink their strategies for a presidential contest in which two candidates have already announced they are running.

It clears the way for Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was Mr. Gore's running mate in 2000, to run. Mr. Lieberman had said he would not run for president this time if Mr. Gore did. Mr. Lieberman's associates, ecstatic at the news, said he would announce that he is running in the next few weeks.

But for some Democrats who are in or about to enter the race, the decision by Mr. Gore is possibly an unwelcome development. All of them had devised campaign strategies based on the premise that they would either defeat or come close to defeating Mr. Gore in one of the early primary states, and as a result vault to the head of the Democratic pack.

A senior adviser to one of the likely candidates, asked what he would do now, sighed and responded, "I'm going to go have another beer."

Two people have taken official steps to enter the race: Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. Other likely candidates include Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the former House minority leader, and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate majority leader who is soon to become the Senate minority leader, is also considering a race.

`Without Gore, I think it's going to be a very even field," Steve Elmendorf, a senior adviser to Mr. Gephardt, said. "You have five or six candidates, all of whom are pretty strong and well matched."