Peggy Noonan

At the end of the week in which President-elect Bush finally came to Washington, the reports are: So far, so good. From public cabinet appointments to private meetings, those who see Mr. Bush in action respond with one word: Good.

Colin Powell? Good. Condi Rice? Good. Mel Martinez? Good. When Paul O’Neill was nominated for Treasury, people were burning up the phone lines from Washington to Wall Street asking: “Is this good?” Within a day and after much head scratching the common wisdom was: Good.

As for meetings, a case in point was this Monday’s 9 a.m. gathering in Trent Lott’s office between Mr. Bush and the Senate Republican leadership—Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Larry Craig of Idaho, Bill Frist of Tennessee, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, along with some 20 Senate staffers and a handful of Bush aides.

It was the first time Mr. Bush had met with all of them in the Capitol, and the first time as president-elect. In the 40-minute meeting Mr. Bush was “relaxed, gracious, and lighthearted” in the words of one participant.

He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it. He began by telling them that not only is he president-elect but he is absolutely convinced that he won the presidential race. He said that having won the race he means to carry out his program. “It wasn’t rhetoric,” the participant quoted him. Mr. Bush said he wanted to move forward on the issues he’d campaigned on: a real across-the-board tax cut with rate reductions for everyone, Social Security reform, Medicare reform and education reform. Mr. Bush went on to say, again according to the participant, “There are two things that I think we need to deal with right up front—the first, the energy crisis, both short term and long term. And the other is the state of our national defenses.’ ” He said may be time to take another look at nuclear power.

Mr. Bush didn’t go into details; he painted in broad strokes. Another who was there said the president-elect revealed some of what his leadership style will be. “You got a sense of the way he’ll work with Congress—’Here’s what I want, now you tell me how you can get there.’ He didn’t say, for instance, ‘I am going to stand on absolute ground that we have to have all the tax cuts.’ It was more of a ‘That’s what I like, that’s what I want, but if you tell me we have to go incremental, we’ll go that way.’ ”

Mr. Bush invited each senator to speak, said he’d welcome advice. A few spoke about energy, some about taxes. When it was Strom Thurmond’s turn, he said: “Wuhk hahd!”

Everyone laughed, and the 98-year-old Mr. Thurmond looked at them. “He duh that, he be a great prezdint!”

Mr. Bush was engaged. He listened; he quipped. “It was the first day of the honeymoon,” the participant said. The senators left the meeting “feeling the man is wonderfully charming and engaged in small groups like that. I think he is easier just to like than his father or even Reagan was, because his personality is so easygoing. Reagan had a sharper direction, and he had two or three ideas, not six. He would have been simpler, and he would have been more eloquent.” But Mr. Bush “was one of the gang—no pretense, none at all.”

*   *   *

Privately, senators talk about and worry over the difference between the Bush in the room and the Bush at the podium. In a room, in small meetings, he is sharp, funny, knowing. A senator told me, “When he was with us, the words didn’t trip; the grammar and usage were perfect, no mispronunciations.” But “he stiffens up in front of the TelePrompTer.”

Senate Republicans want the American people to see the Bush they see—the Bush in the room—when he is at the podium. Because the Bush in the room is reassuring—his persona and personality, his Teddy Roosevelt-like brio, his quickness and quick understanding are reassuring. People leave him feeling confident in him, and impressed.

The man at the podium, however—the man who makes the cabinet announcements and who answers the questions from the press on whether he’s damaging the economy by talking it down—is not so reassuring, because he looks nervous. His nervousness is understood by viewers—by the American people—to suggest fear: fear of the job, of the reporters, of the viewers, of the microphones.

The good news: Mr. Bush is not afraid. Those who meet with him can see it. The bad news: He looks afraid when he speaks in public, which is where the vast majority of people see him.

The good news: This is a fixable problem. Eight years ago that old smoothie Bill Clinton walked clumsily, didn’t know how to salute the Marine at the door of the helicopter, jogged around in little shorts, took forever to make his appointments and then spent a month taking them back: Bye, Lani; sorry, Kimba; see ya, Zoë.

Mr. Clinton now is sleek and sure, but that’s not how he started. He had to work at it. So does Mr. Bush. Everyone who supports him wants him to devote time now to working seriously and with commitment at the particular demands of the public presentation of the presidency. Every day he should be taking half an hour to work on the TelePrompTer, and like his father he should work with a speech coach. Why every day? Because it will get rote and boring. And once it begins to feel rote and boring he will begin to lose his self-consciousness.

Bad news: Mr. Bush tends to see public presentation as a phony part of the job, and he doesn’t love it. But it’s not a phony part of the job. It is the job. A presidency is a public thing.

Good news: Karen Hughes and others around Mr. Bush understand all this.

*   *   *

A second concern Republican officials on Capitol Hill have about Mr. Bush: Does he know how hard the Democrats are going to be on him? All presidents who’ve been governors unconsciously take their statehouse experience with them into the Oval Office and think it will form some kind of paradigm for their White House experience. And they are, as we all know, always wrong, because the presidency is different not only in size but in type. It’s a different animal.

The Democrats of Capitol Hill are not the Democrats of Austin. Texas Democrats are more like Republicans. Congressional Democrats are sui generis. Sometime back a member of Congress told me: “Tom Dashle is like George Mitchell, he’s so nice and sincere and reasonable—on the outside. He has a soft voice and demeanor. You’d go to dinner with him and think what a good guy. But he’s intractable, he looks for the advantage at every point, and he’s mean.” The Democrats of Austin made deals and stuck to them; arm twisting and cajoling and charming and pressuring were part of the game. But the Democrats of Capitol Hill are ideological, and so they are ferocious.

The Republicans of Capitol Hill are wondering if Mr. Bush understands this. The president-elect keeps saying he knows what to expect and he’s ready. But as a Senate veteran told me, “You never know what to expect and you’re never ready.”

Mr. Bush seems confident when he talks about the Democrats. Which leaves Republicans wondering if he knows more than they do or they know more than he. They’re hoping he knows more.

Republicans in the Senate expect a tough year. The scenario might become brighter if some of the newly elected Democrats who have been Governors, and who have worked with legislatures, become part of a functioning moderate majority. The new members—Thomas Carper of Delaware, Ben Nelson of Nebraska—could find themselves voting with moderates like Louisiana’s John Breaux and senators who are up for re-election in two years like the other Louisianan, Mary Landreau. This could be good news for the Republicans, and for Mr. Bush.

Another potential challenge Republicans speak of quietly on Capitol Hill is John McCain. In the Senate, as every schoolchild knows, one man can stop everything through the power of the filibuster. So watch Mr. McCain, who made his agenda clear last week in a meeting of Republican senators. He told his colleagues that he has a bigger constituency than they: “I’ve made promises to the American people.” His agenda of course is not Mr. Bush’s—not tax relief or Social Security or Medicare reform—but campaign-finance reform. In the words of a colleague, “He’s just gonna do his own thing and it doesn’t matter what impact it has on anyone else.”

So while Mr. Bush is thinking he is going to begin the people’s business with the issues he campaigned on, John McCain means to do the people’s business with those he campaigned on.

Stay tuned.

*   *   *

It is a matter of wide and hopeful belief on the left, and among those who ask questions on talk shows, that the right is ready to eat Mr. Bush for breakfast, that “right wingers” will soon make his life impossible with demands, that conservatives will bring him to heel if he makes the wrong move.

This is not true, and is a wonderful example of thinking that what was true in 1989 must be true today.

But the left’s expectation of trouble is good for Mr. Bush. He will be his moderate-conservative, compassionate-conservative self, and will not begin his presidency with a conservative version of gays in the military. And for being himself and not doing something stupid, he will receive credit from the establishment for standing up to pressure that wasn’t there. Plus, since there’s always someone who wants to stand up and scream—since some conservative is going to want to be The First One to Denounce Bush—that person will be given serious and respectful treatment in the press, and Mr. Bush again will receive establishment credit when he ignores him.

The fact is there is not a conservative leader in America who is not acutely conscious of the position Mr. Bush is in. Beyond that, conservatives leaders feel they know Mr. Bush as they didn’t know his father, and they trust him as they didn’t his father. They think they know his heart. And conservative leaders have mellowed. They’re all older and more seasoned than they were 20 years ago when Ronald Reagan came to town and they came to power. They’re mellower in part because they’ve spent the past 10 years observing their country and concluding that the great concern is not which program passes or doesn’t, but who we’ve become as a people and what kind of culture we live in together. That’s the big ballgame now; tax policy and Social Security reform are important, but who we are trumps everything, and is not so answerable and healable in Washington.

How the right means to treat Mr. Bush was made clear Thursday morning in a Washington Times essay by Paul Weyrich, a dean of Washington conservatism and head of the Free Congress Foundation. He outlined the “responsibility” of conservatives in the new era: “We have to realize that Mr. Bush is in a position like no other president has been in more than a century. We have to cut him some slack. . . . We cannot sit here in judgment of his every move waiting to pounce on him.”

That from the man whose fierce torpedoing of John Tower as Defense Secretary in the first days of the first Bush presidency was a blow from which the first President Bush never wholly recovered.

*   *   *

The president-elect had a good week. His cabinet appointments have been uniformly well received and demonstrated unshowily that Mr. Bush meant it when he presented a party convention last summer of striking ethnic diversity. The president-elect has a tropism toward Republicans who are members of minority groups. He is impressed by them, understands the courage it takes to be them, wants to support them. All to the good.

The staff decisions he has made so far have been unsurprising. The Texas power grid that gave shape to his governorship and presidential candidacy will give shape to his White House. They earned it, they’re talented and discreet, they work hard, and they know their man. They’re Texans and they seem like Texans, and that’s good too.

I remember visiting President Bush’s White House eight and nine years ago and talking to people. It seemed to me as I walked the halls and chatted with people in offices that what I was seeing was a universe of tennis players. The middle level and some of the upper levels of the staff seemed stocked with people who had played on the courts of Houston’s clubs. I’d meet someone and then be taken aside and told with hushed voice, “He was Jebbie’s doubles partner.”

They were good people. They were attractive and courteous and believing and idealistic and dim. They seemed to me decent dullards, and though the cliché about the Bush White House was that it was John Sununu and a thousand interns, I always thought of it as a bunch of guys in whites.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, has the cowboy thing, not the patrician thing. His brio—the swagger, the shorthand, the nicknames, the joshing—seems working-class. I don’t know why he has a Texas accent and Jeb doesn’t, or why something in him seems working-class or middle-class and the rest of the family doesn’t. But it’s good.

I hope he has Midland oil men and businessmen and librarians and roustabouts on his staff, I hope he has born-agains and former delinquents, academics and intellectuals and poets. But no tennis players. No sparkling people in white. Or very few, and only for diversity’s sake.

America now knows who its next president is, and this is cause for joy. But think how hard it was to end the Clinton-Gore era. It may well be that hard for the next president to get out from under its shadow.

One of the biggest things George W. Bush has in his favor is the realization that the facts of his presidency—the famously split Senate, House, country, vote—will be so challenging as to be almost insurmountable. He’ll get a lot of credit for surmounting.

*   *   *

Those of us who expected a solid Bush win, one that would allow him to claim a meaningful mandate, now turn to the fact that the close win yielded only one unarguable mandate: to help clean up voting and registration so that Florida never happens again. The next president will have to lead the movement to raise and regularize standards, and to restore trust in the system on which democracy depends.

There was no mention of that in the Bush victory speech. But Mr. Bush and Al Gore, in their own ways, signaled some of what the future holds.

Mr. Gore’s speech was the better of the two, which was too bad. America needed a great hello more than a good farewell.

Mr. Gore’s compressed and almost elegant address had an obviously dramatic text: I lost and I’m leaving. It had a lively subtext too: I’ll be seeing y’all again.

He’s going home “to mend some fences.” He regrets he “didn’t get a chance to stay and fight for the American people over the next four years.” He says, “It is time for me to go.” This is how political figures talk not when they’re dead but when they’re very much alive but want you to find them poignant for a while.

It is an odd thing that American political figures often give the best speeches of their lives when they lose. It’s as if defeat jars them enough to let the eloquence out. This was true of Richard Nixon in his famous free-verse goodbye—”My mother was a saint/ And I think of her. . . .” It was true when Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and when Ted Kennedy lost to Mr. Carter—”The cause endures, the dream will never die.” And it was true, on Wednesday, of Mr. Gore.

As he said his father used to tell him, and let’s not check this story out, “Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.” He also looked younger, refreshed, as if he’d been washed clean of anger. Mr. Gore will be watching and Mr. Gore will be back, and when he returns he’ll be a better candidate than the man who just lost.

Mr. Bush’s speech, on the other hand, was not deeply impressive. Having decided to follow Mr. Gore and not let him have the evening, he spoke late and without energy. He was surrounded by tired people acting out joy.

But there were hints of what we can expect. His remarks had a saving and salutary dullness, like a political address from the old days, formulaic and clunky.

Mr. Bush as president is probably going to be more interesting than his pronouncements. He spoke of compassionate conservatism, making clear that that philosophy will not suffer the fate of Bill Clinton’s “new covenant,” on which Mr. Clinton campaigned throughout 1992, and which was never heard of again from the moment he made it to the White House.

“I believe things happen for a reason,” Mr. Bush said, and this seemed particularly genuine. He believes there is a God who is an actor in history, who touches and changes lives. He has been thinking about what the past five weeks have meant. He has probably been wondering if the contested election was a chastening, a warning about unbridled confidence. He had been too secure; he has been brought up sharp now, and humbled.

A supporter of his told me, “This is the best thing that ever happened to him,” and he is not alone in that observation. A reporter who covers him with sharp eyes told me that Mr. Bush and his aides reminded him of John Kennedy and his, and that the election drama may have kept a Bush Bay of Pigs from ever happening.

Ultimately, the address did not seem quite equal to the moment. Mr. Bush did not speak as much and as seriously about the five weeks as he might have, about the meaning of the wait and the meaning of its end. He spoke not to the American people but to the people in the room.

There was a feeling of fatigue in the room, which was understandable, and the crowd applauded as if they’d been told not to get too excited. They didn’t.

If it had been a Clinton crowd, they would have been exhorted to show wild support. The lighting and music would have been dramatic. He would have stood with one arm around Hillary and one around Chelsea, all of them looking up. He would have glistened like young Kennedy. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, didn’t know if he should kiss his wife when the speech was over—Ick, I’ll look like Clinton—and would look at her quickly and look away.

He seems to enjoy his awkwardness and to be proud of his modesty, as if he thinks they show that he’s not handled by handlers, not a born political manipulator. He’s not. But after eight years of Clintonism it is not clear that that will be an unalloyed benefit.

Mr. Bush’s speech said more than hello to the American people. It said a big goodbye too. Not to the Clinton-Gore era, but to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, to the producing by Hollywood of an American presidency. There will be no bridge-too-far moments, like Mr. Clinton’s marching through the bowels of a convention center as manly music blares. But there may be a lot of bridge-not-far-enough moments. We may be entering the new awkwardness.

Republicans used to be better at producing the presidency than Democrats, but mostly it came down to Ronald Reagan and bright balloons, to Reagan being Reagan. He used stagecraft to underscore his points. The Democrats, the party of Walter Mondale, were no match. But in the Clinton era they became the party of a sleek Hollywood-produced presidency, with the stagecraft itself as the point. Mr. Gore would have continued this. Mr. Bush seems uninterested in it.

For eight years, the American people have had an actor/rock star in the White House. He brought his own narrative with him; he brought stories and filled the White House with them, and soon the airwaves were thick with them. Was the first lady subpoenaed? The movie star slept in the Lincoln bedroom? What did he tell the grand jury—and will it be on TV? The woman said Mr. Clinton did what? The guy died in a park? Did you hear she said her cat was threatened?

Mr. Clinton brought his own long-running drama to the national stage, and we all watched it unfold each day, grabbing our hankies and roaring with laughter and throwing tomatoes. It was drama, utterly confounding and often riveting, sick but nonetheless seductive. Eight years of that. A lot of people are hooked on it.

Can we go cold turkey from drama boy to boring boy? From a strange and fascinating bad man to a normal and fairly predictable good one? Can the American people return to normalcy? That of course was the phrase Warren Harding’s men used to describe his coming to the presidency on the heels of the dramatic Woodrow Wilson. “Will he get us into war?” “They sank our ship!” “Will he live?” “Is Mrs. Wilson running the country?” Stay tuned!)

*   *   *

Maybe Mr. Bush should begin to think in terms of his own narrative. Maybe the real question is whether he and his people will write it, or whether it will be imposed on him by the media.

One thing is sure. The media abhor a vacuum. If they find one, they’ll fill it. Which suggests the Republicans, who have despised the sleek savvy of the Clinton years, may have to emulate it to some degree. Mr. Bush has not only got the White House. He’s got a great, grand stage. Mr. Clinton strutted there. Mr. Gore would have too. And Mr. Bush? Will he develop a sharper stagecraft to go with his statecraft? Now that he’s on stage—a large, grand stage—he needs a greater narrative, and a bolder sense of drama.

To: Vice President Al Gore
From: Communications Staff, Gore-Lieberman 2000

Sir, we understand from a friend of Mrs. Gore who was overheard this morning talking on the phone with a cousin of Drew Schiff that you are going to drop out. If this is true, sir, we’re here to help.

Our thoughts:

First, you’re obviously right. You know the old saying, when riding a dead horse it’s best to dismount. This is over, but you’ll ride again.

Second, your speech tonight will have a lot to do with how people remember this whole fracas, and your role in it. So it’s important for history that you get it right, and it’s important to the American people, but it’s also important to you. It may dictate whether you have a future in politics.

Remember what happened after Richard Nixon made his bitter, crazy concession speech in California in 1962—”You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” He was finished. Jack Kennedy watched it in the White House and shook his head. “No class,” he said. He was right. It took a war in Vietnam to get Nixon back into the game.

You’re in a great position. Focus on it. Just about exactly half the country voted for you and not Bush. You won a plurality of the popular vote; you may have won the whole election, no one will ever know. Probably a quarter of the electorate will always think Bush won on a technicality. So you’re not History’s Big Loser, you’re The Guy Who Came Within an Inch and Bowed Out With Class.

We know you’re feeling anger, and frustration, but please don’t second-guess yourself. Don’t listen to those advisers who are diehards; don’t let them sway you. They want you to stay in because there’s a 1% or 2% chance you can still win. And they wouldn’t mind seeing you spend your last personal capital on that 1% or 2%, because if lightning strikes they emerge as winners, and get more clients and billable hours. They’ve got an agenda. So do you, but it’s not theirs.

You must step down tonight and concede, fully. Do it gracefully and with a kind of height. Do it so well in fact that Americans across the whole country watch you and then turn to their wives and husbands and say, “Darlin’, I am wondering this moment if we’ve gotten ourselves the right man.”

The way to hurt George W. Bush is to save yourself, to be so graceful he looks puny. Then you can come roaring back in time.

So this is not a defeat. It’s a tactical retreat.

*   *   *

All right, tonight. A speech in prime time. We recommend that you speak, for the first time in history, live from the vice president’s office, just down the hall from the Oval, in the West Wing. Nice big desk, nice bookcase, nice pictures in the background. We’ll get a few more flags.

It should be a full and formal TelePrompTer address, no more than 15 minutes and preferably 12.

All nets and cable will obviously cover it live. Every eye in the country will be riveted on you. That’s probably never happened to a vice president before.

Be gracious. Don’t be afraid to show it hurts; hurt is endearing, especially from you.

Don’t mention that you “won the popular vote.” Everyone knows. The newscasters will come out of your address noting it for you. You’ll get credit for not saying it.

You’ll have to help Bush. He’s the next American president, and he begins his presidency in extraordinary circumstances. So you’ll have to help him by lauding him and asking your supporters to come together behind him. This is the patriotic thing to do. It also appears to be the patriotic thing. Again, you’ll get a lot of credit.

Keep in mind that nobody wants to beat you up tonight; they want to say nice things. So don’t argue your case anymore, don’t defend your actions. Others can do that for you. Tonight is for grace.

The world has to know that America is together, because the moment people think our country is divided beyond healing, the world becomes a more dangerous place. Emphasize the point:

To those leaders and members of other countries far away, I hope our peaceful resolution of this great disagreement has been as educational and even inspiring for you as it has been for us. But make no mistake. While Americans have different views and different philosophies, and while we have great disputes, too, we always ultimately walk down the same path. And we walk down it together. Always have, always will. We are united in our love of country, our commitment to democracy, our protectiveness of liberty.

*   *   *

Again, ask your supporters to support the new president. They won’t, most of them, but you’ll get credit for asking.

Mention your allies, the activists and unions, Jesse Jackson. “I have urged the Rev. Jackson to meet with the new president . . .”

That will make you look big, like a peacemaker. It also puts Bush on the spot. He’ll look churlish if he doesn’t meet with Jesse the way he wouldn’t meet with you. And anyway, the reports that minority neighborhoods got the oldest voting machines is a true scandal. It’s just wrong. Someone ought to put it on Bush’s plate right away. The only mandate he really walks in with now is this: a mandate to clean up the American electoral system. Ask him to do that as his first act. Again, it makes you a big-picture man; you’ll get credit. And he’ll have to do a lot of heavy lifting.

We think the tone should be The Full Shrummy—kind of magisterial, something with a certain formality and bigness:

In the past five weeks there has been much movement and action—clamor, and anger, and hopes. We have been in a Great Disagreement. But now it is over, now the clamor recedes, and we accept, fully and without reservation, the outcome.

And now we must continue together as a people, and surely we will. “We are not enemies but friends,” Abe Lincoln said. And so we are.

Beyond this big house the Potomac flows and the lights of Virginia glitter. Life goes on, the great nation goes on. I and my party have had a loss, but it is a small thing in the long history of the oldest democracy in the world. And though I have been defeated, the principles for which I fought have been upheld.

Mr. Bush will become President. The governor fought a long and hard campaign, one that in many respects deserves admiration. He is in a particular position now. He will need all our help. And we will give it to him. I personally will offer any encouragement or advice I have, and I urge you all to do the same.

In just a moment I will walk from this room. I will see you all again at the inauguration of Mr. Bush, when I as vice president of the United States peacefully take my part in the transfer of power, the peaceful transfer that has always distinguished our country.

I love our country enough to drop this challenge, I love our country with a great protectiveness, with great respect. I wish Mr. Bush well and remain at his service. And I ask you to join me in this thought, which is really a prayer, and one that has been answered every day for more than 200 years: “May God bless the United States of America.”

Well—something like that. Something bigger than you, and this, and what happened.

*   *   *

Then get out.

No meetings with the press, just walk out. And go away.

Go back to Tennessee. Don’t go regal. Take a train or bus if you can, no reason to take Air Force II. Leave that stuff to the new guys. Let them run it into the ground. Harry Truman walked to the train station the day he left the White House. Go like that.

Say you’ll depart the stage now for a while. Remember what Reagan used to say—he quoted some old Scots ballad when he lost to Ford in ‘76—”And I will lay me down and bleed a while, and then I will rise up and fight again.”

Really disappear from the scene for a year. People, to be frank, won’t miss you, not right away. Every time they see you the next few months it’ll remind them of The Big Mess. The Dems are mad at you for losing, the Reps for suing.

Sometimes you gotta give people a chance to miss you. So disappear. Let them watch Bush undistracted by your presence. They’ll get tired of him. Then you can rise your head, in the spring of 2002, and say, “I’m here!” You are knocked within and without your party for forever putting your own interests before the party’s. Make it up to them. When you come back in ‘02, come on strong, campaigning hard for the Dems in the off-year elections. By then people will have thoughts about their criticisms of you. Show the party you can play as part of a team.

In the next 18 months, rest and replenish. Government service, as Henry Kissinger said, is all intellectual outgo; you bring what wisdom and information and perspective you have in with you, and spend it each day in the White House. Get some intellectual income. You need it. Read some books. Ponder. Do things you don’t have to do. Recover your joy.

*   *   *

A last thought. The day before Christmas you can be seen taking stuff out of the vice president’s residence, old rocking horses and baseball mitts and stuff. Put it in a Ryder truck in the driveway. Jeans, turtleneck sweater. Tipper. Hug. Turn back to the house and then turn left, notice the press 40 yards away taking pictures, and wave.

Good shot. Kind of poignant.

There will probably still be a few right-wing nuts on Massachusetts Avenue, chanting “Get out of Dick Cheney’s house!” Go over and give them hot chocolate and pose for pictures and chat. Tell them you don’t agree with their views, never did and never will, but will defend to your death their right to hold them.

Your grace will be a hard cold lump in their throats.

On second thought, you don’t really have to be that gracious. Heck, who was it, Reagan? Rocky? He gave some protesters the finger and mouthed “We’re No. 1!” Go ahead. You’ve earned it.

Let’s not talk about Florida and Bush and Gore. That story is stuck. It’s as if we’re all living in a big muted mosaic. The lawyer gesturing at the lectern on CNN is a piece, and the legal scholar commenting on the lawyer’s arguments on Fox is another. The headlines and cartoons and editorials are pieces, the rally with Jesse Jackson exhorting the crowd is a piece, David Boies with his wonderful calm-madman’s style is a piece, as are the e-mail jokes and the tapes of fat ladies singing. We’re struggling through the last days of a trauma that we all feel is over, know must be ending, can’t imagine continuing much longer. We are waiting for a big and final wave to come and wash the mosaic away in history’s tide.

While we wait, let’s think about something instructive and constructive that happened yesterday.

Candor broke out on Capitol Hill, and a few hearts got worn on a few blue pinstriped sleeves. Members of the U.S. Senate stood on the floor of their chamber and spoke, usually without text or notes and often at some length, about a man they admired. What they said offered a heartening picture of clarity, and maybe even of hope.

*   *   *

The Senate stopped in its tracks to honor and mark the departure of Slade Gorton, the Republican member from Washington state whose defeat by 2,229 votes last week erased the Republicans’ clear Senate majority.

Politicians of course like to honor people. There’s no downside to being moving and eloquent about a friend, or a foe, especially a vanquished one. There’s usually no price to pay for being generous. And you can use the formal honoring of another to honor yourself: If it weren’t for his constant encouragement I wouldn’t have been able to pass the major legislation I’ve authored and shepherded lo these many years . . .

But this was different. It was personal and passionate and bipartisan. Democrats stood to honor him, with moving words from Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. Democrat Patty Murray, soon to be Washington state’s senior senator, spoke, and a letter from Joe Lieberman was read, praising among other things Mr. Gorton’s bipartisanship during President Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Republicans spoke with a sense of loss that seemed apart from the obvious blow of losing a majority.

Gordon Smith of Oregon read from the Bible and asked who now would stand for the loggers, the lumbermen and fishermen of the Pacific Northwest. Pete Domenici of New Mexico said Mr. Gorton “has to come out near the top of the list of influential senators in the conduct of occurrences of great significance in the United States Senate.” Mr. Domenici said Mr. Gorton had usually exercised that influence with blunt words behind closed doors, and that during Mr. Gorton’s 18 years in the Senate, few pieces of legislation had moved through it without his fingerprints.

Mr. Gorton’s colleagues invoked some of the great senators of history. New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg compared him to Daniel Webster. “As you look around this institution, you think ‘He reminds me of so and so . . .’ The highest praise for me would be ‘You remind me of Slade Gorton.’ I consider him one of the finest if not the finest senator I know.” Phil Gramm of Texas compared him to Sam Houston, “also voted down by the people of his state . . . yet he is among the most honored of our citizens.” Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called him “one of the great senators of the 20th century” and compared him to Arthur Vandenberg.

The speeches were so emotional, so much like eulogies, that the senators had to keep reminding themselves out loud not to use the past tense. But they couldn’t help it, any more than they can help feeling that when you’re a senator and you lose your seat you’re dead. But also because, as each made clear, they couldn’t stand the thought of losing all the experience, talent, shrewdness and seriousness that Mr. Gorton had brought to the chamber. That’s why when Mr. Dorgan, a Democrat, heard what was being said, he joined in. He said that often he would “get the glassy eyed look” from senators with whom he was trying to discuss the issues of the day. “But not Slade. He did his homework.”

*   *   *

“It was real, and so much of this town is not real,” Tony Williams, Mr. Gorton’s chief of staff, said later. “Gorton is—they call him E.F. Hutton because when he speaks, everybody listens. But what makes him unique among senators is they may not agree with his thinking on a subject but they all want to hear it. He’s one of the rare people in this town who can ‘stop traffic’—he can force people to put aside their agendas and listen. He is not a self-promoter and they know it, so they think, ‘I better put down the paper and listen to this guy.’ ” Williams added, “He’s the best senator that no one’s ever heard of.”

Over and over Thursday the speakers spoke about two things. Because Mr. Gorton was wise and calm and highly intelligent, he was listened to. And because he wasn’t a showboat, he was respected. He wouldn’t just pop off with a statement and hope to get credit for it. He was the last to run for the microphones, though he wasn’t above noticing who did. He spoke on the floor less often than some other senators; he spoke in private councils. He probably authored fewer bills, but shaped more law through advice and addendum.

In all of the praise you could hear the sound of an institution defining itself, showing through what it said what it values and honors.

I think it was saying this: In the clamor of big egos bumping into daily events that is Congress, we do notice who gets things done, who really works. Who really thinks, who contributes, who has a long-term historical view, who is a patriot, who doesn’t care who gets credit, who will quietly counsel and help you with your problem and not capitalize on it or use it against you, who stands not only for the party but the country and not only for the job but for the institution—the Senate, this august chamber, which can actually make a difference in people’s lives, and which is a strong and necessary element in our republic.

It is good when politicians define an ideal. It is good when they say they believe they’ve seen it, or something like it.

Maybe in the arduous year ahead they can go back and look at what they said about Slade Gorton, and remember what it is they admire and honor.

*   *   *

People who write for newspapers don’t really get to be very positive about people in politics very often. It’s sort of a sign of being a sissy. You get the best laughs, and you’re quoted most often, by putting someone down in a witty or interesting way. To do the opposite—to laud someone in politics—is like wearing a sign that says This Guy Fooled Me.

But it’s good to write about those you admire, and to explain why. It’s constructive I think. So now, inspired by the Senate, I’m going to do some more of it about Slade.

He has been famous in his 18 years in the Senate for several things, one being that he often called influential columnists, friends, and political operatives to lobby them in support of important pieces of . . . literature. He is a voracious and possibly compulsive reader of novels and history, and in the middle of meetings he will phone a friend to remind him to get A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” or Mark Helprin’s “A Soldier of the Great War,” or Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times,” or “Correlli’s Mandolin,” a novel by someone whose last name is De Bernieres, which I know because that’s what I wrote when I put Slade’s Post-It on my bookshelf two years ago.

I met Slade 10 years ago, when he wrote me after my first book came out. He asked specific and acute questions about writing and speechwriting. Soon afterward I met him in Washington and became a friend, which meant joining his informal book club and taking regular phone calls that tested the political and personal weather.

I want to say he is unusual for a political figure but actually he is unusual, period: a genuine intellectual who lives in the world of ideas and yet a person who is simply delighted to be alive. Everything he does is so much fun. This sounds corny, and sometimes is, but every stranger he meets is interesting and says the smartest things. Every hockey game yields up fascinating glimpses into his athletic young niece’s character. His constituents, especially the recent immigrants, are simply the most brilliant and hardworking people in the world. And his wife just said the most amazingly on-target thing about Al Gore, would you like to hear it?

He has zest. I have simply never known anyone who enjoys life as much as he does. He is 72 and has seen a great deal. He is now boasting that his doctor last week said he has the heart and lungs of a man in his 20s.

Among political figures, rarely have shrewdness and idealism been so intertwined. His career has been marked by the pursuit of progress within a framework of politics as the art of the possible, as they used to say. He has a conservative’s insights and a moderate’s instincts.

He is from an old eastern family, the Gortons of Gorton’s seafood fame, but he’s not at all high-hat, and is so approachable and easygoing that his staff calls him “The Nerdy Professor” and other names, some unprintable, and he thinks it’s a riot. When he tells me how his staff is fighting him, colorfully, on some issue, I am sometimes surprised. Once I said, “You let kids on your staff talk to you like that?” He said, “We pay them to talk to me like that. That’s why they’re here!” They are not allowed to call him Senator, only Slade.

It has led in his office to a creativity born of lack of fear. “We hammer him,” says Tony Williams. “ ’You’re gonna wear that out here? I don’t think so!’ He’s very easygoing. He looks formal but he’s not.”

*   *   *

What was saddest for his fellow Republicans about Slade’s cliffhanger loss was that it was only in the past five years that he came to be a leader. Before that he was a bright senator from the minority party and a not-too-important state. Also, he didn’t have a wonderful senatorial look, the way Jay Rockefeller and Fred Thompson do.

Slade is a thin and wiry man, a marathoner, with a large and longish head and big eyes, on which for many years he wore contact lenses, which often irritated his eyes, leading to a great deal of blinking. He looked like an intelligent light bulb going on and off. It put some people off. Then he got that eye operation that makes you see 20/20, and the blinking stopped. Before that the Republicans took control of the Senate, and that was the point at which he rose to become the closest advisor to the majority leader, Trent Lott.

I asked Mr. Lott about Mr. Gorton’s departure, and he said, “It means a great deal not only to me but to the Senate. He’s one of the most intelligent if not the most intelligent senator we have in this body. He’s become my closest confidante. He’s the best—solid, committed, working across the aisle. And when you ask for his advice, he doesn’t tell you what he thinks; he tells you what you need to know.”

All the talk of advice prompted me to call Slade and ask if he had a secret. He said it’s not so much a secret as a way of operating. You have to remember that the purpose of advice is not to make you look smart but actually to help the person seeking it. When someone asks you for advice, you don’t give it as yourself, with your needs and realities and views. You take a moment and put yourself in his shoes. “You try to put yourself in exactly the circumstances that that person faces, and you think of what would be best for them to do under those circumstances. Not necessarily what you would do yourself, but what they should do themselves. I try not to be Slade Gorton, with his philosophy and circumstances, but to be a particularly thoughtful Joe Shmoe.”

*   *   *

Slade was elected to the Senate in the Reagan landslide of 1980, lost his re-election bid in 1986, and then came back to win Washington state’s other Senate seat in 1988. I asked him what his biggest achievement was in those 18 years. “If I did one thing that had a profound impact on a significant number of lives that changed people’s lives it was after Tiananmen Square. It was the bill that allowed Chinese students and other Chinese nationals to stay in the U.S. and not be required to go home, to stay permanently if they wished.”

The bill passed in 1992, and it was tough getting it through the Bush administration, because they were trying to be nice to the Chinese government. To Slade it served a dual purpose. “America is a land of immigrants, and some of these students were in danger, and certainly deserved the right to stay here. But I like it when immigrants bring something to our society. They were a lot of the most brilliant people China has produced—physicists and physicians and engineers. They were not only a benefit to the United States but their loss was an appropriate punishment of communist China for the way in which it treated its people.”

The Chinese Student Protection Act directly affected some 45,000 students and professionals and their families. They’re here because Slade persuaded and led and pushed and built support.

*   *   *

The bad news is all that capacity for work and wisdom has been removed from the Senate, where it did a lot of good. The good news is that a new administration is about to begin, with many leadership appointments yet to be made. Mr. Lott’s loss could be President-elect Bush’s gain. The new administration will need respected nominees who will get a fair hearing in the evenly split Senate. “Slade was not just a member of the club, Slade was an admired member,” Mr. Lott told me. “I think he would be overwhelmingly favorably received for any position. Solicitor general—he’s got the demeanor, the experience. He could be an attorney general, a Supreme Court justice.”

Maybe that’s what they were saying Thursday morning and afternoon in the Senate.

The scene: Midnight, Tuesday, in a mansion in the city. Inside, on the second floor, a handsome man with dark hair and sharp but fleshy features thrashes about on a king-size bed. He can’t sleep. It’s the noise. They’re chanting outside, across the street—“GET OUT OF DICK CHENEY’S HOUSE! GET OUT OF DICK CHENEY’S HOUSE!”

Close-up: The man in the bed puts a pillow over his head, around his ears. We hear his muffled internal dialogue:

“I’m gonna win this thing one way or the other, mark my words. Tie it up in the courts. Tie it up in controversy. I’ll exhaust Bush into conceding for the good of the nation. Heck, time I’m done I’ll exhaust the nation into conceding.

“Why not? What do I lose? If I win I win—everything. If I lose I still get to make a gracious-loser speech and say all I was looking for was justice. A really great ‘Profiles in Courage’ type speech. If we can get those yokel judges to string this thing along we can win back public opinion, and even if at the end I don’t win by a dozen votes I’ll still have clouded Bush’s victory even more.

*   *   *

“If I walk now what do I get? Nothing. I’ll be nothing. This is my life. What am I gonna do, run a government in exile? Who’d join? No one in the party likes me. What will I do with my resume? Go home and run? I couldn’t even carry Tennessee. Make speeches at 50, 75 grand a pop? What does that get me? Tipper’s no litigator. And Hillary could steal my thunder. A Clinton-Gore showdown in 2004—I’ll lose that battle. In a primary she’ll roast my chestnuts on an open fire, with Jack Frost nipping at my nose! Bill Clinton will help her—I’m Sore Loserman who blew the patrimony.

“I thought my speech Monday night was good. The flags, the emotion—‘A vote is not just a piece of paper. A vote is a human voice . . .’ I thought I got it across that this isn’t about me. I’m protecting democracy.

“Learned that from Bill. The impeachment, Monica, the mess. He went around saying ‘This isn’t about me, this is about protecting the Constitution.’ So that’s what he was doing. Talk about multitasking! But it worked.

“Nobody caught the tense I used the other night when I talked about the outcome. ‘If the American people choose me, so be it. If they choose Governor Bush, so be it . . .’ Not chose—choose. Future tense for the future president. This election is not over. The campaign is not over. There is no outcome. It must be discovered. In the future.

“The polls are turning against me, so now I’m asking for a full state recount. It’ll take days, weeks, months, to get this all sorted out in court. But I think it makes me look fair.

“I know they’re making fun of me. They think I’m like Rhett in ‘Gone with the Wind’ after his daughter Bonnie Blue dies—he stays in the room with the coffin making believe she’s not dead. They’re all waiting for Miss Mellie to come in and tell me it’s over.

“Well, there is no Miss Mellie. And it’s not over. I get up every day and game-plan, just like I used to. I tell Billy Daley what to do, I tell the speechwriter what I want, I tell Tipper to get out there and wave. We’re only buying ice cream, but so what?

“I saw Bush in his rinky-dink little speech. The way if the prompter doesn’t move quick enough to the next line he stops and waits like a doofus. ‘And so I will create a transition’ pause, pause, pause, ‘team.’ He doesn’t reassure with his strength. I reassure with my strength.

“And Reagan’s. I did a full Reagan imitation Monday night and all Tuesday. I’ve studied the Gipper and do him better than anyone. Why doesn’t anyone tag me on this? Get an old tape of Reagan standing at a lectern, the way he cocked his head, did a little shoulder roll, the good-natured chuckle. Can’t they see I’ve totally ripped it all off and put it on like a suit? I’ve become him, his mannerisms are mine! I do this because he was good—and if I seem like him, people will think I’m good.

“But I’m no phony, I’m me: the man who understands media and who tries to seem like other men you like. I’m just looking for the most popular version of me. If the American people would settle down and pick the one they like best—Reagan Gore, Kennedy touch-football Gore—I’d stick with it. I have discipline. But can they decide? No. They lack discipline.

“Speaking of the president. He’s loving all this. Me and Bush get to play the part of the warring children, he gets to play The Wise Judicious One. He gets to wear the Mideast Peace Face—‘Surely we can reason together, Yasser.’ That phony good-natured ‘children will squabble’ look he gets. He likes what’s going on because it makes him feel like—well, not a child. Like a victor. Like the Man Who Didn’t Need a Recount.

“Wait till I’m president and it’s pardon time. I’ll wear my good-natured Children Get Into Trouble face.

“I have friends telling me step back, who wants this dog’s dinner of a presidency that’s coming up? I’ll be Asterisk Boy with an almost even Senate and a split House and no chance to do anything big, and the next guy gets the recession anyway. But maybe not. The economy’s still so strong. And anyway, it looks like Big Bill is getting the dot-com recession. I’ll walk in and turn it around. As for the split Congress, so what? It means I can’t come through on my pledges—the big spending, the budget busting. I never would have gotten it anyway and if I had it would have hurt the economy. So I’ll lay down on spending and get credit for wanting it and credit for bowing to reality and not pushing it. And as for a tax cut, we’ll get one but it won’t be Bush’s big one, it will be my small one.”

Again, chanting from outside. They seem to be saying a poem: “I’ll count the ballots one by one/And hold each one up to the sun!”

Close-up again on the man in the bed:

“The Dr. Seuss poem again. It’s all over the Internet. Everyone’s sent it to me. I hate it. I am not the Cat in the Hat.”

The voices from outside continue: “I won’t leave office! I’m staying here!/I’ve glued my desk chair to my rear!”

The man on the bed:

“When this is over I’m gonna find out the names of those guys and find out what they belong to and I’m gonna put together a RICO suit at Justice . . .”

Voices from outside: “How shall we count this ballot box?/Let’s count it standing in our socks!/Shall we count that in a tree?/And who shall count it, you or me?”

The man on the bed: “Don’t get mad, get even. Later for mad, now for planning. Gotta keep Democrats aboard, keep the media. Broder with that Thanksgiving column—if he were on my side he wouldn’t be so sad. Gotta watch the Dean. Gotta keep Daschle and Gephardt. They looked embarrassed with the big phony phone call Monday. But so far they’re with me.

“Sixty percent of the people in ABC’s poll say I should leave. Zogby too. And Bush is getting some mileage out of leaking who’ll be in the administration. Cheney, hand it to him, he’s tough. But Powell won’t jump aboard until it’s very safe. Could be a problem if someone like Sam Nunn jumps to Bush, but he plays it safe too. That’s how they got where they are.

“The press picking up on that ‘Bush is a uniter not a divider’ stuff—that’s taking. It’s looking like maybe this is the first time since ‘94 the people have been with the Reps in a crisis. But here’s the thing—this time I can win without the people. I can win it in court. My guy Boies said so the other day. He said ‘This is something that’s too important to be solved in a partisan environment. This is something that ought to be decided by impartial judges.’

“Picking a president is too important to be decided by the people, take it to the judge! Uh oh, I thought. But he got away with it. And that’s our plan.

*   *   *

“You think I wouldn’t fight this all the way to the point of getting information about that elector who’s been through rehab twice and is drinking again, the elector with the little tax problem—you think my people won’t lean on them? You think we won’t fight this through the floor of the House? You think we won’t use any means, low and lower? You think I’m gonna wrap this up in a week? Only if Bush concedes in a week.”

And now he was happy. And now he could sleep. But first he threw off the pillow, bounded from the bed, walked to the window and yanked it up. He leaned out and yelled. “Fasten your seatbelts. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

But the crowd couldn’t hear him above the chanting: “I will not say that I am done/Until the counting says I’ve won!” There was laughter then and he heard it, he listened for a moment. And then he slammed the window shut.

The scene: Midnight, Tuesday, in a mansion in the city. Inside, on the second floor, a handsome man with dark hair and sharp but fleshy features thrashes about on a king-size bed. He can’t sleep. It’s the noise. They’re chanting outside, across the street—”GET OUT OF DICK CHENEY’S HOUSE! GET OUT OF DICK CHENEY’S HOUSE!”

Close-up: The man in the bed puts a pillow over his head, around his ears. We hear his muffled internal dialogue:

“I’m gonna win this thing one way or the other, mark my words. Tie it up in the courts. Tie it up in controversy. I’ll exhaust Bush into conceding for the good of the nation. Heck, time I’m done I’ll exhaust the nation into conceding.

“Why not? What do I lose? If I win I win-everything. If I lose I still get to make a gracious-loser speech and say all I was looking for was justice. A really great ‘Profiles in Courage’ type speech. If we can get those yokel judges to string this thing along we can win back public opinion, and even if at the end I don’t win by a dozen votes I’ll still have clouded Bush’s victory even more.

*   *   *

“If I walk now what do I get? Nothing. I’ll be nothing. This is my life. What am I gonna do, run a government in exile? Who’d join? No one in the party likes me. What will I do with my résumé? Go home and run? I couldn’t even carry Tennessee. Make speeches at 50, 75 grand a pop? What does that get me? Tipper’s no litigator. And Hillary could steal my thunder. A Clinton-Gore showdown in 2004—I’ll lose that battle. In a primary she’ll roast my chestnuts on an open fire, with Jack Frost nipping at my nose! Bill Clinton will help her-I’m Sore Loserman who blew the patrimony.

“I thought my speech Monday night was good. The flags, the emotion-’A vote is not just a piece of paper. A vote is a human voice . . .’ I thought I got it across that this isn’t about me. I’m protecting democracy.

“Learned that from Bill. The impeachment, Monica, the mess. He went around saying ‘This isn’t about me, this is about protecting the Constitution.’ So that’s what he was doing. Talk about multitasking! But it worked.

“Nobody caught the tense I used the other night when I talked about the outcome. ‘If the American people choose me, so be it. If they choose Governor Bush, so be it . . .’ Not chose—choose. Future tense for the future president. This election is not over. The campaign is not over. There is no outcome. It must be discovered. In the future.

“The polls are turning against me, so now I’m asking for a full state recount. It’ll take days, weeks, months, to get this all sorted out in court. But I think it makes me look fair.

“I know they’re making fun of me. They think I’m like Rhett in ‘Gone with the Wind’ after his daughter Bonnie Blue dies-he stays in the room with the coffin making believe she’s not dead. They’re all waiting for Miss Mellie to come in and tell me it’s over.

“Well, there is no Miss Mellie. And it’s not over. I get up every day and game-plan, just like I used to. I tell Billy Daley what to do, I tell the speechwriter what I want, I tell Tipper to get out there and wave. We’re only buying ice cream, but so what?

“I saw Bush in his rinky-dink little speech. The way if the prompter doesn’t move quick enough to the next line he stops and waits like a doofus. ‘And so I will create a transition’ pause, pause, pause, ‘team.’ He doesn’t reassure with his strength. I reassure with my strength.

“And Reagan’s. I did a full Reagan imitation Monday night and all Tuesday. I’ve studied the Gipper and do him better than anyone. Why doesn’t anyone tag me on this? Get an old tape of Reagan standing at a lectern, the way he cocked his head, did a little shoulder roll, the good-natured chuckle. Can’t they see I’ve totally ripped it all off and put it on like a suit? I’ve become him, his mannerisms are mine! I do this because he was good-and if I seem like him, people will think I’m good.

“But I’m no phony, I’m me: the man who understands media and who tries to seem like other men you like. I’m just looking for the most popular version of me. If the American people would settle down and pick the one they like best—Reagan Gore, Kennedy touch-football Gore—I’d stick with it. I have discipline. But can they decide? No. They lack discipline.

“Speaking of the president. He’s loving all this. Me and Bush get to play the part of the warring children, he gets to play The Wise Judicious One. He gets to wear the Mideast Peace Face—‘Surely we can reason together, Yasser.’ That phony good-natured ‘children will squabble’ look he gets. He likes what’s going on because it makes him feel like-well, not a child. Like a victor. Like the Man Who Didn’t Need a Recount.

“Wait till I’m president and it’s pardon time. I’ll wear my good-natured Children Get Into Trouble face.

“I have friends telling me step back, who wants this dog’s dinner of a presidency that’s coming up? I’ll be Asterisk Boy with an almost even Senate and a split House and no chance to do anything big, and the next guy gets the recession anyway. But maybe not. The economy’s still so strong. And anyway, it looks like Big Bill is getting the dot-com recession. I’ll walk in and turn it around. As for the split Congress, so what? It means I can’t come through on my pledges-the big spending, the budget busting. I never would have gotten it anyway and if I had it would have hurt the economy. So I’ll lay down on spending and get credit for wanting it and credit for bowing to reality and not pushing it. And as for a tax cut, we’ll get one but it won’t be Bush’s big one, it will be my small one.”

Again, chanting from outside. They seem to be saying a poem: “I’ll count the ballots one by one/And hold each one up to the sun!”

Close-up again on the man in the bed: “The Dr. Seuss poem again. It’s all over the Internet. Everyone’s sent it to me. I hate it. I am not the Cat in the Hat.”

The voices from outside continue: “I won’t leave office! I’m staying here!/I’ve glued my desk chair to my rear!”

The man on the bed: “When this is over I’m gonna find out the names of those guys and find out what they belong to and I’m gonna put together a RICO suit at Justice. . .”

Voices from outside: “How shall we count this ballot box?/Let’s count it standing in our socks!/Shall we count that in a tree?/And who shall count it, you or me?”

The man on the bed: “Don’t get mad, get even. Later for mad, now for planning. Gotta keep Democrats aboard, keep the media. Broder with that Thanksgiving column-if he were on my side he wouldn’t be so sad. Gotta watch the Dean. Gotta keep Daschle and Gephardt. They looked embarrassed with the big phony phone call Monday. But so far they’re with me.

“Sixty percent of the people in ABC’s poll say I should leave. Zogby too. And Bush is getting some mileage out of leaking who’ll be in the administration. Cheney, hand it to him, he’s tough. But Powell won’t jump aboard until it’s very safe. Could be a problem if someone like Sam Nunn jumps to Bush, but he plays it safe too. That’s how they got where they are.

“The press picking up on that ‘Bush is a uniter not a divider’ stuff-that’s taking. It’s looking like maybe this is the first time since ‘94 the people have been with the Reps in a crisis. But here’s the thing-this time I can win without the people. I can win it in court. My guy Boies said so the other day. He said ‘This is something that’s too important to be solved in a partisan environment. This is something that ought to be decided by impartial judges.’

“Picking a president is too important to be decided by the people, take it to the judge! Uh oh, I thought. But he got away with it. And that’s our plan.

*   *   *

“You think I wouldn’t fight this all the way to the point of getting information about that elector who’s been through rehab twice and is drinking again, the elector with the little tax problem-you think my people won’t lean on them? You think we won’t fight this through the floor of the House? You think we won’t use any means, low and lower? You think I’m gonna wrap this up in a week? Only if Bush concedes in a week.”

And now he was happy. And now he could sleep. But first he threw off the pillow, bounded from the bed, walked to the window and yanked it up. He leaned out and yelled. “Fasten your seatbelts. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

But the crowd couldn’t hear him above the chanting: “I will not say that I am done/Until the counting says I’ve won!” There was laughter then and he heard it, he listened for a moment. And then he slammed the window shut.

We must fight. And we all know it. And it’s fine.

We like to complain, those of us of a certain age, that history has never given us the gaudy challenges it gave our parents and grandparents. But we’ve had our traumas, and from the time we were children: assassinations, riots, Vietnam, Watergate, the ayatollah, a stuck economy, the fall of the wall. We’ve had our moments.

And now we face a great trial.

And we’re up to it.

So let’s go.

*   *   *

There was a national election on Tuesday, Nov. 7. The presidential race was close, and would be decided by the state of Florida. The state’s votes were counted. At the end it was close, but George W. Bush won.

A statewide recount was immediately and appropriately called. At the end it was close, but Mr. Bush won.

But the higher reaches of the Democratic Party had a game plan for what to do in case of a close vote in a key state, and their machine went into motion while Republicans slept. Even before the recount was over the outcome was contested.

On the afternoon of Election Day a Texas telemarketing firm is hired to call Democratic voters in Palm Beach County and gin up a protest. They had been disenfranchised. By Wednesday there are charges that a “butterfly” ballot, designed and approved by Democrats and published to no protest in the press, was confusing and thus unfair.

Jesse Jackson is dispatched to Florida, where he charges that Holocaust survivors have been denied a voice. Elderly widows announce they never meant to vote for anyone but Al Gore. An army of Democratic lawyers, political operatives and union members is dispatched; they land in Florida and fan out, immediately assisting in demands for a hand count. Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile announces blacks were kept from the polls with racial harassment and, when that wasn’t enough, dogs.

Three Democratic counties in Florida announce they will hand-count. But the rules of the hand count change and change again.

The Florida secretary of state, a Republican elected official, calls a halt. She notes that hand counts are called only when there have been charges of broken machines or vote fraud. Fraud and breakdown were not charged, and did not in fact occur. She says she will certify the election’s outcome based on the original vote count and the recount that followed, plus overseas absentee ballots. Mr. Bush will be the victor.

She is immediately smeared by Democratic operatives and in the press. She is a political “hack,” a “Stalinist,” a “commissar”; she is a vamp, a lackey. The Washington Post, a great newspaper, publishes this description of Mrs. Harris: “Her lips were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick—the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on a shirt collar. Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogeneous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double check—before reading—her latest ‘determination.’ ” Her mouth is “set in a jagged line.” She has “applied her makeup with a trowel.” “One wonders how this Republican woman, who can’t even use restraint when she’s wielding a mascara wand, will manage to . . . make sound decisions.”

At the same time the Democratic operative Paul Begala writes his now-famous essay suggesting Republican candidates draw their political strength from murderers, sadists, racists and the killers of innocent children.

Soon a Democratic operative in Washington is revealed to be gathering information on electors who will vote for Mr. Bush in the Electoral College. Why? To use the information to pressure them to vote Mr. Gore’s way. It would be surprising to hear that the famous Democratic Party private eyes are not on the electors’ trail.

The mainstream press, watching, thinking and facing deadlines, issues its conclusion: Conservatives are guilty of inflammatory rhetoric. Those columnists, writers and public figures who have come forward to oppose what they see as an attempt by Clinton-Gore operatives to steal the 2000 presidential election are denounced as hotheaded and extreme, dismissed as partisan.

*   *   *

The hand counting continues. From the first it is completely open to mischief. In walks mischief.

Ballots for Mr. Bush are put in Gore piles. Scads of chads on the floor. Vote counters can count a partly removed chad, and then an almost-removed chad, and then a mark, a dimple, an indentation, a “pregnancy.” Standards are announced, altered, announced and altered again. Questionable ballots are decided by Democratic-dominated canvassing boards.

Sworn statements under oath begin to emerge: Ballots are found with taped chads; ballots are sabotaged, used as fans, found bearing Post-It Notes, dropped, misplaced. Eyewitnesses say there is clear and compelling evidence of distorting, reinventing, miscounting votes. The vote counters—many exhausted and elderly, some state workers dragged off lawnmowers, work 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. shifts in badly lit rooms. A woman from Broward County whose husband is helping the recount writes, “He said it’s also frustrating because what we are seeing on the news is quite a bit different from what is actually going on, little chads everywhere and they have no idea where they are coming from.”

From the Associated Press, Nov. 18, datelined Palm Beach: “On Saturday [one vote counter] whispered in a pool reporter’s ear as she was leaving [the hand-counting room], “I’ve had it. I’m not coming back. There are some real games going on in here.”

And not only in there. From the Miami Herald, Nov. 18: “At least 39 felons—mostly Democrats—illegally cast absentee ballots in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. . . . Their convictions range from murder and rape to drunk driving. One is in the state’s registry of sexual offenders.”

In the first two weeks there is not a single charge of Republican mischief in the counting rooms. Not a single person comes forward to charge that a Republican has done a single thing that is dubious, untoward or wrong.

How could this be? With hundreds of people making thousands of decisions, is it possible no Democrat would even make up a charge that some Republican had done something wrong? One can’t help but infer that Democratic discipline is, as usual, operative. If they add to the charges of corruption, a fair-minded judge might say: Then we must protect both sides and stop the hand counting. But if they stop the hand counting, Democrats will not be able to find 930 votes for Al Gore. And 930 is what he needs.

So no Democratic charges of corruption are leveled or dreamed up.

*   *   *

There is no evidence that the absentee ballots of felons have been challenged.

But the absentee ballots of members of the military were challenged. Many were thrown out.

In the most shameful and painful act of the hand counts, the Democrats on the ground, and their operators from the Democratic National Committee and the state organization and the Gore campaign, deliberately and systematically scrutinized for challenge every military absentee ballot, and knocked out as many as they could on whatever technicality they could find or even invent.

Reports begin to filter out. The Democratic army of lawyers and operatives marches into the counting room armed with a five-page memo from a Democratic lawyer, instructing them on how to disfranchise military voters. The lawyers and operatives unspool reams of computer printouts bearing the names and party affiliation of military voters. Those who are Republicans are subject to particular and seemingly relentless scrutiny. Right down to signatures on ballots being compared with signatures on registration cards. A ballot bearing a domestic postmark because a soldier had voted, sent his ballot home to his parents and asked them to mail it in on time, is thrown out. A ballot that comes with a note from an officer explaining his ship was not able to postmark his ballot, but that he had voted on time—and indeed it had arrived in time—is thrown out, because it has no postmark.

The Democratic operatives are ruthless, focused. As one witness says, “They had a clear agenda.”

Received late Wednesday, an e-mail forwarded from a Republican who witnessed the counting of the Brevard County overseas absentee ballots.

It is 11:30 PM (Tuesday) and I have just returned from the count of absentee ballots, that started at 4PM. Gore had five attorneys there, the sole objective was to disenfranchise the military absentee voter. . . . They challenged each and every vote. Their sole intent was to disqualify each and every absentee voter. They constantly challenged military votes that were clearly legitimate, but they were able to disqualify them on a technicality. I have never been so frustrated in all my life as I was to see these people fight to prevent our active duty Military from voting. They succeeded in a number of cases denying the vote to these fine Men and Women.

This was a deliberate all out assault on the Armed Forces solely to sustain the Draft Dodger and his flunky. These people must have a hard time looking at themselves in a mirror. . . . They denied a number of votes postmarked Queens NY, ballots that were clearly ordered from overseas, clearly returned from overseas, and verified by the Post Office that DOD uses the Queens post office to handle overseas mail, were denied because it didn’t say APO, They denied military votes postmarked out of Jacksonville, Knowing full well it came from ships at sea and was flown into Jacksonville . . . .

This is what you can expect from a Gore administration a further trampling on the Military and more trampling on your rights. . . .

The attorneys there treated it all as a joke, and when my wife protested their actions she was told she didn’t understand.

*   *   *

Television both reports the story of what is happening in the vote-counting rooms and doesn’t report it. There are comic pieces and sidebars: “Amazing as it seems, Bernie, there’s actually a charge that one of the Democratic counters has eaten a chad!”

But 16 days into the drama there has not been a single serious, extended and deeply reported piece on network television investigating the charges comprehensively. No “60 Minutes,” no “Dateline,” no “20/20.” No extended look at charges of vote tampering, no first-person interviews with eyewitnesses who saw the Democratic operatives go after and throw out the military ballots.

Television does, however, report “extraordinary anger among Republicans.” Ed Rollins says “partisan Republicans” are very angry about this. Bill Schneider on CNN says he’s never seen Republicans in Washington “so angry.” They muse about “the big question”: Will these Republicans ever accept the legitimacy of a Mr. Gore if he becomes president?

Oddly enough Republicans do not think that’s the big question.

Can the Democrats steal this election is the question.

Why is mainstream television (not the talk shows, not Sean and Alan, not “Crossfire,” but the mainstream news shows) missing this story, underreporting it?

It would be taking sides.

It would be partisan.

It would be extreme.

But there is more. We have all noticed the ideological evolution of media in our time. Television is liberal, establishment-oriented, and does what it does: It entertains. Shut out of television and eager for news, conservatives have turned in the past 20 years to radio. And so now radio is conservative, and full of uproar. The Internet too is conservative, and full of information, of samizdat.

But television, the elite media, the great broadsheet newspapers, and the clever people who talk loudly on television—that is, the powers that be, the forces that are—day by day appear through action and inaction, through an inability to see and a refusal to see, to be (a) allowing the stealing of an election in Florida, and (b) subtly taking out the critics of this hijacking.

*   *   *

What are we to do?

In 1939, during parliamentary debate on the coming war in Europe, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain finished another of his hopeful, frightened speeches about making peace with Hitler. The Labour member of Parliament Arthur Greenwood rose to speak in opposition. As he did, the voice of a Tory parliamentarian pierced the chamber. “Speak for England, Arthur!” he called. At that the chamber exploded, and Chamberlain realized that further appeasement was intolerable.

We are all of us, one way or another, in the Greenwood position. And we must speak not as members of a party but as members of a nation—the great and fabled one that has been, through our lives, the hope of the world.

*   *   *

The Florida Supreme Court, known for its liberal activism, consisting of six Democrats, one independent and no Republicans, ruled that Mrs. Harris must include in the certified Florida results the final tallies from the corrupted hand counts.

Gov. Bush will fight in the courts and perhaps in the state Legislature. “Make no mistake,” he said Wednesday in responding to the justices in Tallahassee, “the court rewrote the law. It changed the rules, and it did so after the election was over.”

And we must fight, too.

We must first of all know this will not be over soon. We must be in it for the long haul and must fight in any peaceful and legal way open to us.

Yesterday we rested and thought and spent time with our families and thanked God for all he has given us. Today we must return to the trenches, refreshed and ready.

Ideas, all modest and obvious, and yours will be better:

Every Republican senator and congressman, every governor and state legislator should starting now come forward and pledge his opposition to the Gore attempt to steal the election. They should be all over the local airwaves back home, making the case against the dishonesty that is occurring. They might point out that most thieves have enough respect to rob a house when it is empty, but in this case the thieves are stealing while the country is home, and watching.

Every writer, scribbler, Internet Paul Revere, talker, pundit, thinker, essayist, voice: Come forward and speak the truth. Howl it.

We must point out what needs be pointed out again and again and not ducked or hidden: The Clinton-Gore operatives are trying to steal the election—and it is wrong. The Democrats in their hunger for power will throw the men and women who protect us with their lives over the side—and it is wrong.

We must keep our arguments sharp. The other night Alan Colmes challenged Newt Gingrich: Do you really think it fair to charge the Democratic Party with trying to suppress military votes? Mr. Gingrich replied that you can see the Democratic plan in this: They issued a five-page memo on how to knock out military votes, which they assume lean Republican. There was no five-page memo on how to throw out the absentee ballots from Israel, which they assume lean Democratic.

Ever since this exchange I haven’t heard anyone ask if the Democrats really mean to be doing what they’re doing.

We must accept that the venue of the fight will change and change again. This all may be decided by the Florida Legislature. Or the U.S. Supreme Court. Or in Congress. When venues change you must be nimble.

We must be prepared, and learn all we can, and know all we can, and spread the word.

We must accept too that in spite of being spoofed and put down and accused of being extreme, it is not wrong to fight in this case, it is right. It is not irresponsible—it is the only way of being responsible.

It is wrong to yell “Fire!” for the fun of upsetting your neighbors. It is right to yell “Fire!” when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

We must through e-mail and telephone calls and call-ins to radio and television report all of the data we are receiving, all of the evidence that the theft of an election is taking place day by day in Florida. Those on the ground in Florida, in the counting rooms, must even more become part of this. The one thing history needs more of—and the courts need, too—is first-person testimony.

Some have suggested a march. I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but it should be discussed, and soon. Perhaps a march on Washington, perhaps millions, perhaps dressed in black—in mourning for an attempt to subvert democracy. I suppose it would look like a huge New York dinner party, but it would also look like a people resisting. Perhaps they should march silently, past symbols of democracy that are more eloquent in their silence than we with our sound. Perhaps there should be placards with the names of men and women from military bases whose attempt to vote for their commander in chief has been denied.

Lawn signs. E-mail chains spreading word of what is happening in the counting and the deliberating. Calls to political leaders, to local newspapers, to radio and television, registering our dismay and resistance.

It must of course remain peaceful—peaceful protest, passive resistance, voices strong, clear and modulated. We don’t support breaking laws—we support upholding the law.

*   *   *

And of course, in some part of our minds we must look to the future. To legislation that will normalize and regularize our voting procedures, make clear and just its rules and regulations, see to it that a Florida will never happen again.

A new modesty seems in order. We Americans like to brag about how this oldest and greatest democracy can always teach the other, little countries how to perform. We’ve been braying and sending our vote counters to less secure republics for years. The cocktail parties of the world are now having fun at our expense. They should. A modest bow from us seems in order.

And this idea, from a conservative activist. In January President Bush, as his first act in office, should announce that he will give a complete pardon to anyone who goes down to the FBI within 30 days and swears out a confession of his involvement in vote fraud and vote tampering in the 2000 elections. It’s harder to spin history when history has the affidavits.

And of course we must all pray. I say this more than I do it, and not many of us have done it enough, which is the reason this happened. Prayer can move mountains; it could have redirected Al Gore’s ferocity and need, too. Prayer—simply talking to God—is the one thing without which we lose.

And after praying, consider this. There is now all over the Internet a quote attributed to Stalin that for so many sums up the Florida story: “It doesn’t matter who votes, it only matters who count the votes.”

True enough at the moment. But I prefer the last words of a more likable lefty, Joe Hill of the Industrial Workers of the World: “Don’t mourn—organize.”

For many years there has been a famous phrase that derives from the 12-step recovery movement. It refers to a thing that is very big, and obvious, and of crucial importance, that people around it refuse for whatever reason to acknowledge. It’s called the elephant in the living room.

There is an elephant in the living room in the Florida story. Actually, it’s a donkey. And actually, there are a number of them.

When the story of the Florida recounts and hand-counts and court decisions is reported on network and local TV, and in the great broadsheet newspapers, the journalists uniformly fail to speak of the donkey in the living room. They give great and responsible attention to the Florida story. But with a unity that is perhaps willful, perhaps unconscious, perhaps a peculiar expression of an attempt at fairness, they avoid the donkey.

You know what the donkey is. The donkey is the explicit fear, grounded in fact, in anecdotal evidence, in the affidavits of on-the-ground participants, and in the history of some of the participants, that the Gore-Clinton Democratic party is trying to steal the election. Not to resolve it—to steal it. That is, they are not using hand-counting to determine who won, they are using hand-counting to win.

They are attempting to do this through chicanery, and by interpreting various ballots any way they choose. As in, “This ballot seems to have a mild indentation next to the word Bush. Well, that’s not a vote. Person might have changed his mind. This ballot seems to have a mild indentation for Gore; the person who cast this ballot was probably old, and too weak to puncture the paper card. But you can see right here there’s a mark kind of thing. I think that’s a vote, don’t you Charley?” “Oh yeah, that’s a vote all right.”

That’s how the chads probably got to the floor in the counting rooms. That is one of the increasing number of stories—none of which are ever the lead, all of which wind up on page 11—indicating the possibility of significant vote fraud throughout the election.

*   *   *

Columnists are writing about it—George Will wrote a great column suggesting what is happening in Florida amounts to an attempted coup, and Michael Kelly wrote suggesting Mr. Gore is not a helper of democracy but a harmer of it; the conservative magazines have weighed in, as has The Wall Street Journal editorial page. You can hear vote fraud discussed on the all-argument political shows on TV and radio.

But it is not reported as news. And it only counts when it’s news. And this is most extraordinary because the Republican fear of fraud—the legitimate fear of it—is the major reason the Bush people don’t want more hand counts. They do not trust the counters.

This question—the extent of vote fraud in this election, and the fact that the Republicans think it is governing what is happening in Florida—is not the unspoken subtext of the drama. It is the unspoken text.

Republicans are convinced, and for good reason, that Bill Daley, who learned at his father’s knee, and Al Gore, who learned at Bill Clinton’s, are fraudulently attempting to carry out an anti-democratic strategy that is a classic of vote stealing: Keep counting until you win, and the minute you “win” announce that the American people are tired of waiting for an answer and deserve to know who won.

Could a political party in this great and sophisticated democracy, in this wired democracy where sooner or later every shadow sees sunlight, steal a prize as big and rich and obvious as the presidency?

Yes. Of course. If the history of the past half century has taught us anything it’s that determined people can do anything. What might stop it? If the media would start leading the news with investigations into the prevalence of vote fraud and the possibility that the presidential election is being stolen.

*   *   *

There have been a number of shameful public moments in the drama so far—Mr. Daley announcing that “the will of the people” is that Mr. Gore win, Mr. Gore’s own aggressive remarks in the days just after the election, Hillary Clinton announcing, in the middle of what may become a crisis involving the Electoral College, that her first act will be to do away with the college. And there is this Internet column from Paul Begala, who prepped Mr. Gore for his debates with Mr. Bush. He acknowledged that when you look at an electoral map of the United States, you see a sea of red for Mr. Bush, and clots of blue for Mr. Gore.

“But if you look closely at that map you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart—it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay—it’s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees—it’s red. The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African-Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re all red too.”

It was a remarkably hate-filled column, but also a public service in that it revealed what animates Clinton-Gore thinking regarding their opponents: hatred pure and simple, a hatred that used to be hidden and now proudly walks forward.

It stands in the living room too.

As does the unstated but implicit message of the hatred: that extraordinary means are understandable when you’re trying to save America from the terrible people who would put George W. Bush in the presidency so that they can kill more homosexuals and black men and blow up federal buildings and kill toddlers. Really, if Republicans are so bad it’s probably good to steal elections from them, don’t you think?

I never thought I would wind up nostalgic for the days when I merely disagreed with Democratic presidents. But whoever doubted the patriotism, the love of country, of John Kennedy or Jimmy Carter?

This crew we have now, Messrs. Gore and Clinton and their operatives, they seem, to my astonishment as an American, to be men who would never put their country’s needs before their own if there were even the mildest of conflicts between the two. America is the platform of their ambitions, not the driving purpose of them.

Another donkey in the living room: the sense that Republicans are no match for the Democrats in terms of ferocity, audacity, shrewdness, the killer instinct. Republicans seem incapable of going down to the level of Gore-Clinton operatives. They think that you cannot really defend something you love with hatred because hatred is by its nature destructive: It scalds and scars and eats away.

Republicans seem to be losing the public relations war. The Democrats have David Boies and Bill Daley, each, forgive me, smooth as an enema, in Evelyn Waugh’s phrase. The Republicans have James Baker, who seems irritated and perplexed. Perhaps he is taken aback by how the game has changed, how the Democrats he faces now operate by rules quite different, and much rougher, than the ones they played by 20 years ago.

*   *   *

Now the game for the Gore camp is to win any way you can in Florida, and if you can’t win delay, and in the delay maybe you’ll win when the Electoral College comes together, or maybe at the very least even if someone stops you, you’ll have ruined the legitimacy of the man who does win, which will make it easier for you as you wait in the wings for the rematch in 2004.

There are a lot of donkeys in the living room in Florida, and maybe the Bush people should start to talk about them. Maybe that will make them news. It can’t hurt. It’s a circus down there anyway.