Peggy Noonan

Why did Hillary win, and win so big?

She won because she chose to run in a state that has two million more registered Democrats than Republicans, a state with a strong liberal infrastructure, a state in which her husband is adored. She won because the Democratic nominee for president beat the Republican in New York by 25 points—60% to 35%. Al Gore’s rising tide lifted Hillary Clinton’s boat, and capsized Rick Lazio. The Lazio campaign thought his candidacy would survive a Gore win of 15% or less, which is where the numbers were a week before the voting; over 15% would probably not be survivable. (This underscored the wisdom of Mrs. Clinton’s choice of New York. If she had gone back home to Arkansas, she would have drowned in the George W. Bush tide.)

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Mrs. Clinton won because she ran a better campaign than her rival—more insistent, more focused, more disciplined. She won because she was a good candidate—hardworking, tough, unwavering.

She won because she pounded the state almost every day for 18 months, a lifetime in politics. She used that time to make the impression she wanted to make, to shake every hand and tour every precinct, to memorize the state bird and dazzle her fans with her knowledge.

Mr. Lazio had none of these things. He came in late, unknown and 20 points behind. Libby Pataki, the governor’s wife, said some already famous words about why; she later apologized but shouldn’t have. She said that Rudolph Giuliani spent the first nine months of 2000 “jerking everybody around” as he pondered his existential realities. In that time Mrs. Clinton put a dynamic campaign in place.

Having been a great New York mayor, Mr. Giuliani succumbed to Great Man Disease: “This is all about me.” It wasn’t about him, but the people of New York, who were forgotten in his calculations.

Those New Yorkers who say Mr. Giuliani could have beaten Mrs. Clinton are probably wrong. He would have suffered from the same dynamics as Mr. Lazio, and in addition would have brought to the race his reputation as insensitive and divisive. Mr. Lazio was the best candidate available.

The Clintons energized Hillary’s base with their celebrity and cemented their advantage with intense minority outreach and, apparently, record minority turnout. There is anecdotal evidence of brilliant organization: The last weekend of the election, members of New York’s minority communities were getting four taped phone calls each, from Bill Clinton, from Bill and Hillary together, from Jesse Jackson and from former Rep. Floyd Flake.

The unions were also disciplined; members showed up in record numbers.

Early exit data suggest professional women who are Democrats, and who had throughout the campaign resisted Mrs. Clinton, came home. The last commercial of Hillary’s campaign, broadcast the weekend before the election, reached out to them. A tough blond Long Island woman, a breast-cancer survivor, speaking in perfect New York pitch, said Mr. Lazio had failed the community. She said she knew some women had doubts but said, “I tell them, get over it. I know her. She’ll be there for us.” It was the best commercial of the campaign.

Early numbers continue to be interesting. It appears that Mrs. Clinton did better than Mr. Lazio at pulling out her base. How could this be? The Lazio campaign tried so hard to reach beyond its base that it forgot its base. It didn’t hit hard on Mrs. Clinton’s record—her statements and speeches showing a lifelong leftism that would encourage higher taxes, higher spending, more regulation, more government, less freedom. It thought the Republican base knew Hillary, and thought that would be enough to get them out.

By the end I thought Mrs. Clinton would lose in part because I thought Mr. Bush would lose New York by a dozen points, and in part because she lacks a New York style. New Yorkers like their leaders to have either class, grace and intellect (the Daniel Patrick Moynihan model) or a leavening New Yorkishness, a one-of-usness, like Al D’Amato and Mr. Giuliani. Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was marked by a lack of grace and graciousness, a charmlessness and cynicism—on the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, on Jerusalem, on the United Nations vote—that managed even in this time and place to dazzle.

But powerfully countering that was class’s best substitute: the appearance of class. The look of it. Mrs. Clinton was glamorous, surrounded by limos, agents, an entourage, Hollywood stars; she looked like one of the most famous women in the world. She was sleek, professional, a glamorous blond CEO in a shiny silk suit. She was attractive; she attracted.

*   *   *

In the end, though, Mrs. Clinton won because Mr. Bush collapsed.

We are all so busy looking at Florida and wondering how it will play out that we have paid little attention to what appears to have been a stunning Bush collapse in the final week of the campaign. Pollster John Zogby was right—it was in the final days, and particularly the last weekend, that Mr. Bush’s numbers went down and Mr. Gore surged. Mr. Bush indulged himself. As a man who loves him and supports him said, “He hasn’t been in politics long enough to know to be scared. What was he doing in California, where he wasn’t going to win? What was he doing in New Jersey and Maine? He’s a good man but this was the arrogance of the naive, of those who think they’re lucky.”

Mr. Gore fought tooth and nail, and he knew exactly where to go—sweating in the dark at rallies and going scrambling for every vote with Ben Affleck in star-loving Miami.

Mr. Bush was home, sleeping, as last-minute undecideds appear to have broken for Mr. Gore, all of them in opposition to the tradition that last-minute undecideds go for the challenger.

Mr. Bush is awake now, though.

The biggest lesson for conservatives on Mrs. Clinton: We know who she is and long ago made our decisions about her. But our understanding of Mrs. Clinton is not shared by moderates and liberals. They do not share our aversion, or, sharing it to some degree, have made their bargains with it and have put it aside for other reasons and calculations. This is an important lesson to learn, and will have future applications.

Mrs. Clinton will be modest in the Senate at first, and collegial; she will make friends. In my book on Mrs. Clinton, I spoke of Orrin Hatch talking to reporters one year into her Senate term and telling them how delightful she is. I was interested to see that Mrs. Clinton got one call from a Republican senator the night she won. It was Mr. Hatch.

It is absurd to think that Mrs. Clinton will be one voice of 100 in the Senate. She will be the great Democratic star of national politics, the voice of the Democratic Party. She will come to represent more than she does now and more than anyone ever has.

Her long-term future is being decided now not in Schenectady or Utica but in Florida. If Mr. Gore wins, she will not run for president until 2008. If Mr. Bush wins, we will hear stirrings of a presidential candidacy by early 2003.

She said the day after the election that she will serve out her term. But that’s what her husband said in 1990, when he was running for re-election in Arkansas. He swore he wouldn’t run for president in ‘92. Then he talked to the people of Arkansas and announced they were begging him to run. He called it a listening tour. When it was over he said he would have to bow to their wishes.

We will never forget this night as long as we live. We will never stop talking about it. What a moment in our democracy—and it was Al Gore who captured with what now seems a certain prescience how the whole election might turn out. In one of his last, dramatic rallies Monday morning, Mr. Gore spoke in Miami, and he told the audience that this would be the kind of election we told our grandchildren about, the kind of election where we could brag, “My vote made a difference.”

Well, everyone’s sure did. But not enough!

Almost a hundred million cast. And it may come down to a few thousand this way or that.

And what a night! Florida given too soon to Mr. Gore, taken too soon from Mr. Bush; then Florida, now perhaps the key, is called undecided. Then Florida, now crucial, now decisive, is given to Mr. Bush, who is the winner and our next president. He accepts Mr. Gore’s concession. Then Mr. Gore rescinds the concession. He thinks he may have won Florida.

And so an election that has quite preoccupied the country for more than a year will not, amazingly enough, reach its climax at the end of the day of voting.

The story continues.

And with it come what will soon be a million questions, some of them serious, some of them matters of deep concern.

If Mr. Gore wins the popular vote and Mr. Bush the electoral vote (or Mr. Bush the popular and Mr. Gore the electoral), will the ultimate victor’s prize—the presidency—be diminished or even tarnished by the drama of this election? Will the American people accept as legitimate a presidency that lacks the two pillars of popular and electoral victory, that stands unsteadily on only one? Will the eventual winner forever be Asterisk Boy, his office won by a handful of votes?

What will be the international implications of such an outcome? The world is used to an America that sees itself as the oldest and most stable of democracies. An election of this extraordinary closeness—of this extraordinary delicacy, if that’s the word—might well tend—subtly or maybe not so subtly—to undermine the authority and standing of the future American president in his dealings with the world.

What about voter fraud? How believable will the final Florida outcome seem, and who will decide what is believable and what is acceptable as believable? If the vote count in Florida comes down to a few hundred votes—if, as is possible, Florida, and therefore the presidency, is won by Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore by, say, 214 votes, what is to stop a dozen other close states from having their final tallies challenged? How would this all work, how would it all play out?

*   *   *

Was Mr. Gore right to retract his concession? Certainly the votes were close in Florida, and the national popular vote remains unsettled. But I must admit my thoughts turned this morning to Richard Nixon and his great patriotic act. Nixon, of course, lost the 1960 election against John F. Kennedy by more than 100,000 votes. And he had every reason to believe—and history has tended to back him up—that those votes came through the last minute electoral chicanery of Chicago’s loyal old Democratic war horse, Mayor Richard J. Daley—the man whose son Bill, in the wee hours of this morning, announced that Mr. Gore wasn’t conceding.

Nixon could have challenged the outcome of the election. He was urged to. But he resisted. Do you remember why the famous bad man didn’t challenge the results? If you’re of a certain age you do. He thought it would be bad for the country.

It was a patriotic act—even his great foes admit as much, and have lauded his statesmanship in this instance.

One wonders if Mr. Gore had a moment of remembrance of Nixon’s great moment, and thought himself of holding back on his rescinding of his concession. Perhaps. But one tends to doubt it. The idea of such statesmanship these days might seem quaint. And Mr. Gore’s hunger for power seems sometimes similar to that of Bill Clinton—huge and, perhaps, ungovernable.

In time we’ll read the histories, and know. Perhaps.

*   *   *

As Florida is recounted, will it turn out to be possible for anyone to assert with conviction that in an election in which 100 million votes have been cast, most every vote has been being correctly accounted for?

A last question, and of course like all the others a big one, maybe the biggest, if not the most immediate, of all. The extraordinary and historic closeness of this election puts in sharp relief what so many of us have perceived over the past few decades. And that is that more and more, not less and less, America seems to be divided into two countries—two entities that live with each other, together and yet apart. We have different names for the great divide and refer to the two nations with different phrases—”the culture wars,” “up North and down South,” “big city vs. outer suburbs,” “Christian right vs. Hollywood,” “liberal vs. conservative.”

But it seems this is a time to note that these divisions are growing not smaller in our lifetimes but perhaps more definite, and more evenly divided. Exactly half of our country voted for the liberal, and appears not at all to like or respect Mr. Bush. Exactly half of our country voted for the conservative, and in general seems not at all to like or respect Mr. Gore.

All night all of us looked at the electoral maps—with the big red L starting at the top of the Mountain states, and going on down to Texas, turning right and finishing up on the Atlantic shore. That is Republican America. And dotted in the Northeast, around the Great Lakes and on the Pacific, we see Democratic America.

The states can and do change here and there and now and then. But the sentiments—the worldviews, to use the clunky but serviceable phrase—of the people of each of the two camps seem to stay, and dig in.

And what is most worrisome is the idea that that each of the two nations seems to distrust the other more with time, not less. And yet one of the nations will have to bow to the leadership of the other at some point over the next few days or weeks. And the difficulty with which it bows may tell us a few things about just how divided, and untrusting, we really are.

I will vote Tuesday and so will most readers of this page because we love politics and history. We are interested, engaged, highly motivated. We not only care about our country but see the direct connection between the decisions made at the polls and the country’s literal future.

But not everyone votes, as we well know. This is considered a matter of grave concern in many quarters, but to me it is only partly a matter of concern. It is also to some extent a reason for gratitude.

Because we live in a democracy we are free to vote; because we have individual liberty, we are free not to. We each of us get to decide. We can go or not go, take part of not. This is good. In some countries in the past voting has been mandatory. Even if you didn’t care, even if you were drunk, even if you were completely unwilling, they made you vote. This is not good. It is a violation of rights in the name of “democracy.”

Today I would like to thank that portion of the nonvoting public that does not vote for good reasons.

If you have absolutely no interest in how our country runs and is run, and know that you have no interest, and feel that your disinterest should preclude your taking part in this great national decision—well then heck, thank you for not diluting my vote with your vote. Because I have a great deal of interest.

If you pay no attention to the great issues of the day, refuse to read or hear about politics and politicians, and know that you are utterly uninformed about political and current affairs, and feel that your relative ignorance should preclude your taking part in the vote—well heck, thank you for not watering down the vote of those who bother to be informed, and who put themselves out to learn, who feel it’s part of their responsibility as citizens. It’s good of you not to weaken their vote with yours. It’s good of you to be honest about it.

And if you have no real views on things—if you are in fact that amazing thing in America, a walking talking opinion-free zone, and don’t feel you should be out there voting with all the people who’ve formed views and pondered questions, well, great. Thank you for not voting too.

I’ve always had the hunch that some maybe-significant portion of the people who don’t vote may be acting on a kind of personal modesty or humility: “Why should I vote when I don’t really care, why should I dilute the vote of the neighbors who do, who have signs on their yard and show up at speeches and read the papers? I haven’t really earned the right by caring.” This strikes me as fair minded and just. Also generous.

So I thank principled and honest nonvoters, and hope that when we vote a lot of us think of you and say, “Thank you, modest people for not diluting my serious and thought-through vote. I will try to make the one I cast worthy of your generosity.”

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Most every adult I know will vote this year and not only because we live in New York, where politics is our religion. And not only because we have pro-Hillary and anti-Hillary on our ballot.

Turnout will probably be high pretty much across the board this year because two men are running for president who are very different, who stand for different things; because there is no incumbent; and because so many of us on both sides have been building up passion the past eight years. We’ve been passionately for what’s going on in Washington, and passionately against.

It feels like 1980. Either stay the course or change.

Al Gore is doing a great job this weekend getting out the vote among members of his base, and on Sunday he said something that a lot of us would agree with. He told a rally in Pennsylvania, “This is the kind of election you’ll tell your grandchildren about.” It will be “close” and “hard fought,” he said, and at the end we may be able to brag, “My vote changed the outcome.”

A lot of us feel that way—that our vote really counts this year. It’s almost as if we feel each vote this year has a special weight.

I believe Mr. Bush is going to win this year, that Republicans across the country will do well but that Mr. Bush in particular will win more handily than expected. One of the reasons is that I think the kind of people who poll Americans by phone—and the way they sound as they ask for your views—and the times and places they call—chronically turn off and ignore and so underreport Republican voters. (Also, so many Republicans are the kind of people who would hang up on pollsters. We don’t have time for interviews.) I think the Gore campaign is insisting the race is close because it’s not close, and I think the networks and broadsheet papers are trumpeting the Gore line because they want to whip up interest in their product, which is the news.

And this is all fine with me. First, maybe I’m wrong and they’re right: maybe it is close. Second, and more important, the closer people think it is the more people will feel their vote really counts, the more people will show up.

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The one group I know will show up is the group I expect will have the biggest impact on the election’s outcome.

And they are the Broken Glass Republicans. So named by Byron York of the American Spectator.

They’re called Broken Glass Republicans because that’s what they’d walk over to throw the Clinton-Gore administration out. That’s what they’d crawl over to remove them from power. That’s what they’d crawl over to remove this extraordinary corruption from our national life. That’s what we’d crawl over to give Clinton-Gore a rebuke, and remove them from our history.

The BG Republicans want to do something else. They want to prove that we’re still a good people—that we’re still a good people in a good country, that the Clinton-Gore reality is not representative of who we are.

Someone somewhere along the way will try to capture the sheer propulsive force of the BG’s, the size and drive of their emotional and philosophical commitment.

Let me give you two examples that I think speak of or to how we feel, and I say “we” because though normally I see myself as a conservative, these days I’m rooting so much for the BG’s that I know I must be one.

Bear with me on the cliché, but my examples are movie images.

The first is from “The Verdict,” with Paul Newman. It’s near the end of the movie and the gifted actress, Lindsay Crouse is on the stand. She’s the working class nurse who knows the secret the hospital is trying to hide: The doctors made a mistake in administering an anesthetic, and that’s why the patient was mortally injured. The nurse doesn’t want to testify but she does. And she says of the doctors who did the deed and the establishment that protected them, “Who are these people? Who are these people that they could do this thing?”

It’s a great heartfelt cry. A decent person looking at organized malevolence and saying: These people are not us.

And that’s part of what the BG’s think when they look at the long trail of corruption that has been Clintonism: Who are these people?

Another scene, from the movie “Rudy.” A popular but not fully appreciated movie of about a dozen years ago about “Rudy” Rutiger, the kid who wanted nothing in life but to play for the Irish of Notre Dame. (It has a wonderful, rousing musical score that they use in a lot of movie commercials. It also has beautiful, tight editing, and first rate acting in the star role by Sean Astin.)

It’s the last game of Rudy’s senior year, his last chance to be chosen to play. He’s suited up, the team is in the field house, they’re waiting to go on. It’s a home game there in South Bend, and it’s a big game, and the coach does the speech.

And he looks at the boys and he says, “No one comes into our house and pushes us around.” And the kids begin to clap, and they take to the field, and they win. And Rudy gets in the game.

That’s how the BG’s feel: No self appointed elite comes into our country and pushes us around, not forever, not without answering. The answer comes Tuesday. And we’ll all be in the game.

It is because of the BG’s that Clinton-Gore are about to be rebuked. They are about to be chastised. They are about to be rejected. They are about to be ejected.

And this is good. A new beginning, a fresh start, the stables swept clean. New history begins.

*   *   *

A final word for those who will vote, and who even look forward to it and, corny as it is, feel a spring in their step as they go to the polls.

The other night I was dining with another family and I turned to a mother and said, “I actually get choked up when I vote. Do you?” I said it because it’s true but also because kids were there and I wanted us to do a little spontaneous commercial for democracy.

And she said, “Oh yes,” and I was surprised. She told me she takes her kids to vote with her, so they’ll remember.

I do that too, I told her, I take my son. I let him press the lever with his finger over my finger.

When I vote I get kissing sickness, and have to stop myself from embarrassing my son. But I want to kiss the curtains of the voting machine, I want to put my lips to them quickly in gratitude. I would like to kiss the metal knobs and paper with the candidate’s names.

My heart beats quickly when I’m in the booth, and my hands tremble a little. I get choked up as I wait on line. I go and sign in at the big registration desk and I am so proud to write my name, it gives me satisfaction, and I make a joke with the ladies who hold the book, and I look at the people on line and smile and I notice a lot of people are kind of—there’s a heightened feeling.

I know I should be thinking things like, “Good men died so I could do this,” and “God bless the Founders,” and in a way I guess I do, but really I’m thinking, Thank you God that I’m so lucky I can vote, isn’t it wonderful this country has been voting for more than two centuries, aren’t we the luckiest people on earth that we have this gift. And we all do it together and we’re all equal and Bill Gates has a bigger boat and a bigger house and a bigger pool than the girl at the counter at the deli next door but his vote is no bigger and has no more weight.

She is his equal.

We are all equal. In the eyes of God, in the eyes of the law, and in the voting booth. It’s really wonderful. It leaves me choked up. Maybe it does you, too.

And so to those who chose this year not to vote: Ladies and gents, I still respect your choice but please start to pay attention so that next year you’ll let yourself vote. It feels great. It’s very moving. So earn yourself the right.

You’re in danger. What you do or fail to do now could conceivably change the outcome Tuesday. So breathe deep, get serious and don’t get stubborn.

Let’s start with the facts, which in many ways are on your side. It happened a quarter century ago. You always said that when you were young and irresponsible you were young and irresponsible. Now we have fresh proof of how right you were. Only you were 30 when it happened, which isn’t so young. But it’s early enough in the arc of the story of your life to be not a revelation but a reaffirmation of what we know: You used to drink much, then you grew up and stopped.

You never lied about your wild and wooly past, and that’s good, and right too. But in your own way you’re sensitive about it. That time I saw you last spring at dinner, as we chatted you mentioned that when you were a young man you’d taught Sunday School in Midland. From everything I’d read about your life I associated your young manhood with party time, so I blurted, “You taught Sunday School? Boy, that musta been some class!”

Karl Rove and Karen Hughes were there and they laughed, and so did I. But you didn’t. You looked mildly irritated.

Well, people get irritated when relative strangers refer to their foibles. But I’ve got a hunch you’re feeling a little irritated now, and if I’m right it’s gonna do you no good, so I want you to listen.

I’m watching you right now, live, on CNN. You’re talking Social Security in Saginaw, Mich. That’s no good. I can almost feel it, thousands of miles away, sitting in my office in New York: The audience is thinking about A, and you’re talking about B. And you can talk B for the next four days, but no one’s going to stop thinking about A.

So you get on A too.

*   *   *

You could lose the election over this thing if it breaks badly, and if you don’t begin to view it as an opportunity.

It’s not that America will turn against you because of a drunk-driving incident 24 years ago, especially when you never hid the theme of your past.

But Al Gore is surrounded by people who see themselves as killers, and they mean to kill you. That’s what I’m told some of them call themselves, “The Killers.” So expect their continued efforts to make you dead.

A Democratic political professional told me this afternoon: “The guy who leaked the story was a Gore delegate to the Democratic convention. And they [the Gore campaign] have no involvement? I’m a priest who can fly.”

What the killers will likely do next is make this story just a bit worse, and then just a bit worse, so by Tuesday everyone who’s for you has doubts. Maybe on Sunday some man will come forward and announce that he owes it to the country to tell us he saw you drunk 10 years ago, after you said you’d stopped drinking. Or maybe some woman will come forward and say you made a drunken pass at her back in ‘90. Whatever it is, even if it’s a lie, it will be the Gore people trying to make the story worse, so you’ll lose.

So what should you do? Know what’s up, and respond. Breathe in deep, put your feet on the floor of the plane cabin, shake your head, and decide to go with what’s going on. Use it to communicate more of who you really are.

That’s apparently not your first impulse. Your first impulse has been to stay on message, undeterred by the scandal.

It’s a mistake. Turn the scandal around by talking scandal. Talk about it the way you feel about it.

*   *   *

You’ve already outclassed Clinton and Gore by owning up to the truth of the story, taking responsibility, admitting the facts are correct. You didn’t lie.

When it happened you actually pled guilty and paid the fine. Your family didn’t try to hide or destroy the records.

A good beginning, but more is needed.

Today or tomorrow, give a serious thoughtful speech about the scandal. Begin with a candid statement in which you again take responsibility, again refuse to dodge the facts, again admit the charges are true, again explain that you didn’t want your kids to know.

That last most everyone understand, a lot of us very personally. It’s something that all of us grownups are facing these days: how to be candid with our kids and yet not corrupt them with our candor, not damage them with an implicit message of “I smoked dope and lived to tell the tale, so can you.” Sometimes you can’t put all the cards on the table, because children aren’t old enough to see the joker was wild.

This statement should be within a speech at a rally, and the speech should be like the one—or exactly the one—you gave at that San Jose rally two days ago. It was a speech about faith and healing, about what makes people become better human beings, and it was terrific. It was about how God changes lives, and how he changed yours.

This scandal is part of that story. So use it, include it, weave it in.

Connect your own past experience with the experience of all of us who’ve done awful and stupid and harmful things. Believe me, and you know without being told: That’s most of the country.

Don’t let this story, and the ones that will follow, knock you out. Let it help you connect and be serious with all the other imperfect Americans.

*   *   *

One of the great and delightful clichés about you is that you’re putty in the hands of your staff—pliant, pliable, ever willing to listen, ponder and agree. But it’s not true. You’re often prickly, sometimes mulish, frequently sure you’re the one who knows the answer. What I’m speaking of is the layer of obstinacy below which is your humility and above which is your charm.

I suspect there’s another element at work here. You saw your father get ragged around by consultants and advisers. Deep down in your gut you hate the idea of consultants and advisers. Or rather, you hate the idea of handlers. You don’t want to feel you’re being handled. You don’t want to doubt your own gut.

And you don’t want to talk about the foibles of your past any more than you have. For a number of reasons including this one: You know your past was nothing compared to those of some of your contemporaries, in politics and out, who never got tagged for bad behavior and who acted up worse than you.

Well, that’s too bad. They’re not running for president. You are.

You don’t want the scandal to change the facts and tone of the campaign—but it’s already changed the facts and tone of this campaign. And now you must be nimble.

*   *   *

Don’t be a rock, be a river. Rocks sit and get hit by the wind and the rain. The elements wear them down. Rivers flow around obstacles. They flow true, with force, they go over rocks and around them and wear them down.

Don’t be a rock, be a river. Flow over, through and around this trouble. You can wear it down into the small thing it is—or should be.

Readers of this page are familiar with the policy questions at issue in the election. As president, George W. Bush’s natural inclination and stated intention is and will be to lower taxes, not raise them, to clear away regulation rather than create it, and to reform Social Security in a way that makes it more lucrative for recipients, more secure as an entitlement, and more respectful toward those workers who will be allowed to redirect a portion of their contributions into markets. He will allow Americans once again to look for and develop energy resources, while opposing irresponsible treatment of precious unspoiled lands.

In taking these actions Mr. Bush will strengthen the foundations of today’s prosperity so the long boom continues. Federal decisions of course can weaken prosperity. Al Gore’s proposals—new entitlements, new spending, a balanced budget and no tax increase—seem so contradictory as to be schizophrenic, and more likely to turn a downturn into a deep recession.

In the area of public education Mr. Bush, unlike Mr. Gore, is sympathetic to the effort to extend choice to those at the middle and bottom of the economic ladder through charter schools and voucher scholarships. This—the school liberation movement—is the most promising development in American public education because, by its nature, it elevates the needs of children over the demands of unions.

In foreign affairs Mr. Bush’s intentions are marked by moral modesty and a lack of illusions: America, he repeated in the last debate, must fully engage the world, but with humility. His first and most crucial foreign-affairs endeavor will begin, appropriately, at home: improving the national defense, remedying the effects of eight years of confusion and neglect, enhancing responsiveness to future challenges, increasing morale, restoring those aspects of the old military culture that are positive and needed.

In all this he will differ from Mr. Gore, who, if he took such actions would rouse the anger of his base, parts of which are animated by a reflexive animus to, or indifference toward, American military might. Having been forced to fight to keep his base during the election, he will not soon defy it in the White House.

In character, personality traits, history and attitudes, Mr. Bush seems the opposite of both Bill and Hillary Clinton and of Mr. Gore. Mr. Bush has an instinctive personal modesty, an easygoing sense of both human and governmental limits. He will know how to step aside and let the country take center stage; he will know how to show respect for others; he will not bray endlessly about his own excellence, will not compare himself to Nelson Mandela, Mark McGuire, or the heroes of the novels “Love Story” or “Darkness at Noon”; he will not discuss his underpants. Laura Bush will not announce that her husband’s power is hers, that she is co-president, and that she will soon nationalize 17% of the gross national product. Both Bushes seem not emotionally troubled but mentally balanced, which was once considered the lowest of expectations for our leaders but now seems like a gift to the nation.

All of this will be a relief. What’s more, it suggests a restoration of civility and grace to the White House, and to political discourse. This will have happy implications for our democracy, and for the children who see it unfold each day.

A Bush presidency would mark a cultural-political paradox: a triumph of class that is a setback for snobbery. Class—consideration, a lack of bullying ego, respect for others—has been not much present the past eight years. The Clintons and Mr. Gore have acted and spoken in ways that suggest they believe they are more intelligent and capable than others—superior, in short. They have behaved as if they believe they are entitled to assist others by limiting their autonomy; thus the tax policies in which they take our surplus and spend it for us, the social programs in which they limit what you might fritter away in your sweet but incompetent way.

The Clintons and Mr. Gore, intelligent and ambitious, came of age at the moment in our history when America As Meritocracy took off like a rocket; and they had merit. They were educated at fine universities at the moment those universities became factories for manufacturing the kind of people who prefer mankind to men and government to the individual. To absorb those views was to help ensure one’s rise. They rose. In time they won power in the system they helped invent—command-and-control liberalism. In rising and running things they became what they are: vain and ruthless as only those who have not suffered could be. Not realizing they were lucky they came to think they were deserving; they were sure they had the right to show the inferior—that would be you and me—how to arrange their lives.

Mr. Bush came from the same generation, lived in the same time, but became a very different sort of man. He wasn’t impressed by Yale; when he saw the elites up close he didn’t like what he saw. He was of Midland, Texas.

He became a businessman, floundered, knew success, experienced disappointment, became a deep believer in God. His religious commitment has meant for him the difference between a clear mind and a double mind. It has helped him become a man who is attached to truth on a continuing basis, and not just an expedient one. It means he sees each person as a unique individual worthy of dignity, freedom and responsibility.

Mr. Bush has the awkwardness of the convicted, meaning roughly, “I’m a mess, or at least have been; I’m not a hypocrite but I’ve been that too. I am utterly flawed and completely dependent; and I’m doing my best.” He knows he is better than no one. The man with the swagger and the smirk is humble.

Mr. Bush has a natural sympathy for, and is the standard bearer of, the modest, the patronized, the disrespected. The lumberman of Washington state who wants to earn his living responsibly and with respect; the candy store owner of New Jersey who’s had it up to here with regulation and taxes; the Second Amendment-loving Louisiana housewife who keeps a gun high up in the closet; the Ohio nurse who worries about abortion and who knows that “You oppose abortion? Then don’t have one!” is as empty and unsatisfying as “You don’t like slavery? Then don’t own one!”; the courthouse clerk in Tennessee who says he’ll go to jail before he’ll take the Ten Commandments off the wall; and the tired old teacher who carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket and knows that while it is a living document it is not the plaything of ideologues. All of these—the shouted down and silenced in what the Clintons and Mr. Gore call the national conversation—are for Mr. Bush, and he for them.

That is a great irony of the 2000 election: The man who speaks for the nobodies is the president’s son, Mr. Andover Head Cheerleader of 1965. But history is replete with such ironies; they have kept the national life interesting.

If Mr. Bush is wise he will continue as president to stand with them, and speak for them, so that in time their numbers increase, and a big but beset minority will grow and become again what it once was: a governing coalition. This election could in this sense be a realigning one.

*   *   *

There is the question of intelligence: Is Al Gore bright enough to be president? Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore are intelligent men, but they have very different kinds of minds. George Bush respects permanent truths and is not in the thrall of prevalent attitudes. He thinks the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest speech ever given. This would strike some as an obvious thing to say, but it takes courage now to say the obvious thing, because to say the obvious is to declare that you see it, and to declare that you see it is to announce yourself . . . a bit of dunce. If you had a first rate mind you’d see what isn’t obvious, such as . . . the illustrative power of metaphor to speak to the existential challenge to postmodern man, which is to flourish within a democratic framework and negotiate its inevitable power centers while balancing the need for communal unity on the one hand with the necessity to find and unlock individual potential on the other.

I don’t think that sentence made sense, but you could speak it in a lot of places—a faculty dinner, the vice president’s house—and elicit nods of approval. And not in spite of the fact that it is nonsense but because of it.

The intellectually ambitious of the Clinton-Gore class seem willing to follow any small crumbs in their search for truths, perhaps because they can’t see so many of the older and enduring ones. Mr. Gore with his metaphor grids and his arrows and circles shows us not a creative mind at work but a lost mind in search of shelter. Henry Hyde once said of Newt Gingrich: “He’s always discovering new things to believe in.” He meant: a real grown-up doesn’t carry on like this, inventing new philosophies, drawing arrows and sparks; a real grown-up learns what from the past is true, and brings it into the present.

Mr. Bush speaks of God and George Washington and Reagan, and the elites find it unsophisticated. But for many citizens it will be good to see in leadership one of such simplicity, grounded in such realities, respecting of such wisdom.

Mr. Bush is at odds with the spirit of the past eight years in another way. He appears to be wholly uninterested in lying, has no gift for it, thinks it’s wrong.

This is important at any time, but is crucial now. The next president may well be forced to shepherd us through the first nuclear event since World War II, the first terrorist attack or missile attack. “Man has never had a weapon he didn’t use,” Ronald Reagan said in conversation, and we have been most fortunate man has not used these weapons to kill in the past 50 years. But half the foreign and defense policy establishment fears, legitimately, that the Big Terrible Thing is coming, whether in India-Pakistan, or in Asia or in lower Manhattan.

When it comes, if it comes, the credibility—the trustworthiness—of the American president will be key to our national survival. We may not be able to sustain a president who is known for his tendency to tell untruths.

If we must go through a terrible time, a modest man of good faith is the one we’ll need in charge. That is George Walker Bush, governor of Texas.

On Saturday I went to the opening game of the World Series, at Yankee Stadium. I felt so lucky: I had a friend with tickets. It was so exciting, really inspiring. It had been two years since I’d been to the stadium, enough time for everything to look new to me—the soft, thick-striped grass, the beautiful mauve-beige of the dirt of the diamond.

I was with friends from college whom I love, and I couldn’t have been happier. I found myself absurdly moved by the thousands of brilliant, sharp lights that exploded through the bleachers as the first pitch was thrown and everyone took pictures to bring home and say, “See, I was there.” And by the handmade signs—”Truth, Justice, and the American League,” “All Aboard.” But the sweetest was a banner held by a man just below us in the right-field seats: “The Luckiest Fans on the Face of the Earth.” After of course the great speech Lou Gehrig gave when, mortally ill, he tipped his hat goodbye to the people of New York.

Well, lucky is what we are.

We took the subway into the Bronx and it was packed. We made friends with a group of young men, and all of us got lost at 125th Street when we jumped on the wrong train. But a stranger with a shaved head in a sleeveless undershirt took us under his wing and led us off at 149th Street in the Bronx. From there we walked to the stadium, or rather toward it; we couldn’t see it against the skyline but we followed a great glow of lights in the darkness, and then headed toward a blimp with blinking lights, and soon we were there, in the great gray coliseum.

There were four of us, two Yankees fans, and a friend and I for the Mets. We made ourselves unfashionable by cheering for Mike Piazza, and when I got home I found myself singing a song called Benny Abgayani, to the tune of “Gary Indiana,” from “The Music Man.” Baseball is so seductive, you can find yourself ignoring it all year, as I do, and then the series comes or a McGwire hits 61 home runs and you find yourself with moist eyes, cheering.

*   *   *

We all agreed the dreaded Yankees, whom of course we root for when they’re playing a team from America, are the team of Manhattan imperialism, the team of the powerful—of Wall Street greedheads and deputy mayors and union chiefs and the kind of people who used to be called Broadway swells. And of course immigrants and working people.

Whereas the Mets, my Metties, are the team of square, flat Long Island and the striving unchic boroughs—the team of the middle and working class. Mets fans aren’t the poor and the downtrodden, they’re in more trouble than that. In a country in which status is everything, the Mets are the team of the nobodies. They are the team of those lacking in status, the ones with no special claims, the people who’ll never be in style. God bless all Met fans, a hardy crew that don’t give a damn.

Democrats, God bless them, are Yankees; they’re better. Republicans, God love them, are Mets; they hate the guys who are better. Hillary is, these days, she says, a Yankee. Lazio is, of course, and has declared, a Met. Gore would be a Yankee, Bush would be a Met. Although years ago he fired Bobby Valentine. But Valentine’s still for him, so there you are.

Anyway it was a wonderful game with thrills, chills and spills, but somehow the most memorable part of the night for me, or the image that lingered, was on the train on the way to 149th Street. All around us as I said were pumped-up guys and poppas with sons and lots of jostling and yelling—and in the middle of the sea of noise was a young woman in a black jacket, holding close a delicate little baby, in a blue-and-white cotton blanket. He slept in her arms. She was black, maybe 30, and her baby had thick, wavy black hair, and I stood near them to be a buffer in case someone pushed or got raucous. After a while I sat down and looked and asked how old.

“Two months,” she said.

“Oh, congratulations, he’s beautiful,” I replied.

“Thank you,” she said, so softly.

She was all alone, apart from all the hubbub, and she stared straight ahead, alone with her dignity, looking toward a window. And as we got off I wondered where she was going and who would meet her, and I wanted to kiss the baby, to kiss his thick-haired head, and my friend looked at her and me and he smiled.

She was all alone. It’s hard to remember that so many Americans are all alone. Last night on television, on Fox, they said one of the biggest parts of the undecided vote in the presidential election is people who live alone . . .

*   *   *

On Monday I stayed home with a pain in my neck—literally a pain in my neck—and had a good time watching Bush and Gore on television. It’s wonderful with all-news cable channels and C-Span that you can watch, live, the campaign unfolding in Nevada and Ohio and Tennessee. It didn’t use to be like that—you used to have to read the newspapers! You used to have to trust the reporter that the crowd went wild or the crowd was small or the candidate sniffled. Now you just have to see what you see. It’s a great gift, and has made all of us anchormen. I am the anchor of my mother-friends; I keep them up on what’s happening.

George W. Bush and Al Gore were slugging it out down South on MSNBC, clashing over education and Social Security. Mr. Bush looks happy and pumped; he prowls the stage like an infomercial master. Mr. Gore stands straight with a mike and looks sweaty and distracted. He never loses his place in the speech, but he keeps raising his voice, as if he thinks the man who talks loudest wins.

Here is Mr. Bush saying: “I am running against a man who is of Washington, for Washington, by Washington.”

The biggest difference between Mr. Bush on the stump 10 months ago and Mr. Bush today is that back then he used to look as if he was afraid he’d win, and now he looks as if he knows he’ll win and is happy about it. I will never forget what he said when I saw him in a speech in New York this summer. “Ahm becomin’ the president. I’m becomin’ it.” He meant he was . . . well, becoming the president, absorbing the fact of it. I thought: Good.

But something makes me nervous about Mr. Bush when he’s winning. A triumphalism, an assumption that good things happen to good people. He is a good man. He’d be a better man if his life had been harder. But you can’t have everything.

I was thinking the other night: Mr. Bush seems the least radical politician in America. He lives in the middle of the land of the possible. He is by nature moderate, by habit and thinking a moderate man. Mr. Gore, with his fevered brow and his dramatic eyes, looks like a man who could be radical—ban all cars!—and who would see his radicalism as proof of his own authenticity.

*   *   *

On Tuesday night a dinner with seven jolly adults. We are friends or friends of friends, and we gather in an apartment in Manhattan, on Central Park West. As we eat the conversation turns to why Al Gore is a liar—that is, what makes him lie, what is it in him? Of the seven, one (me) is a Republican, one a conservative Democrat, the rest Democrats of various points on the liberal spectrum—a former great union leader, a teacher of the theater, sophisticates of all sorts.

Someone says Mr. Gore doesn’t lie so much as embellish and exaggerate. I say no, he actually lies. He makes up stories that are not true. Everyone nods, some sadly.

“But why?” says a woman, with a perplexed look.

“I think” I say, “that what has perhaps happened with Gore is that he is so used to a certain amount of built-in dishonesty in his political positions that when he stands up to speak, the dishonesty stands up with him, and gets a voice, and is allowed to talk. He becomes confused between truth and lies.”

“That is a sympathetic interpretation,” says an intelligent man, and I’m surprised, because if I seemed sympathetic then I wasn’t getting my point across. Then the conversation goes off in different directions.

But this is what I meant and what I’m thinking, and I think there is truth in it:

Al Gore knows that so many of the things he says and has been saying for years are lies. He knows his positions are based on lies. He talks passionately about a woman’s right to choose, and how he’ll never let anyone limit it in any way. But he knows this means he must support a procedure, partial-birth abortion, in which a full-term or almost full-term baby is pulled down from a womb, its skull punctured and its brain sucked out. This is a gruesome form of killing, and of an utterly innocent child, a little frail baby just ready to suck in clean air. It’s the kind of thing an Al Gore would never allow! But Al Gore is for it.

And Al Gore knows what it is. But he cannot oppose partial birth-abortion—or rather he feels he cannot oppose it—because he must not offend any part of his base, including pro-abortion fanatics. Real fanatics, the kind who’d kill a living baby.

On the other hand he can’t say, “I’m for killing babies!” So he says he is against partial birth abortion . . . unless the life or well-being of the mother is at issue.

But the “life or well-being” of the mother is never at issue, as Al Gore knows. That’s only code for: If you really want to get an abortion when you’re eight or nine months you can have one—as long as you say it’s necessary to your well being.

Al Gore knows all the ins and outs, all the gradations of this issue better than you and I. And he’s made his choices. In order to get what he wants—the presidency—he supports something he knows to be sick and wrong. And he lies about what it is. And it’s a big, important lie. It’s not small, like My mother used to sing “Look for the Union Label” as I fell asleep. It’s big.

Al Gore talks passionately about education—we must hire 100,000 new teachers, we must have smaller class size. But he knows the most hopeful proposal of our time to make government schools better is the school liberation movement—including scholarship-vouchers for disadvantaged kids who can, through them, get out of the local dead school and into a living school a few miles away, be it a Bible school or a Catholic school or whatever.

When people like Teddy Forstmann cough up their own money to make $100 million in voucher scholarships available for kids, the ambitious disadvantaged—immigrant kids, black mothers with three kids they’re damn well going to get out of the local hellhole and into that clean school down the road—show up in droves. They wait overnight in line to get their chance. They want choice and freedom and opportunity—just like a senator and his wife looking at all the clean private schools in Washington and trying to choose between Sidwell Friends and St. Albans.

Al Gore knows the poor deserve a chance like the one he got. He knows in his heart they’re just as deserving as he was. He knows that if you believe in equality you believe in giving parents who aren’t senators the power and autonomy to send their kids to a good local school.

But a big part of Mr. Gore’s base—the teachers unions, who see their own power diminishing in a more competitive educational environment—passionately and fiercely opposes vouchers.

So Al Gore lies and says vouchers are bad, a plot to suck money from the system and put it in ungovernable places like—well, like places where nuns teach. Can’t have that.

The list goes on and on. Al Gore knows that it is responsible and constructive to allow greater freedom and choice in Social Security. But he lies and says it’s bad.

The poor guy lies all the time. If he were dumber he wouldn’t know it, but he’s not that dumb.

This is Mr. Gore’s problem: Lies are so built into everything he stands for, everything he says, everything he campaigns on—lies are so built into him, that he can barely tell the difference between the truth and a lie anymore.

The difference doesn’t even seem important. Winning the presidency is all that matters.

And if you lie about big things like human life and the education of children and the financial freedom of adults—if you lie about those things, it barely seems worthy of notice when you make up a little story about what medicine your dog takes and whether you discovered Love Canal or invented the Internet.

If every policy you put forward is based to some degree on a lie, and the degree is often major, then a small, innocuous-seeming personal lie—”And I told Einstein, ‘No, e doesn’t equal mc, it equals mc squared!’ And his hair stood right up! I invented Einstein’s hairstyle!”—seems like nothing.

And when people point it out, it feels like they’re picking on you. That’s why Mr. Gore seems so irritated and put upon when he’s caught in those little lies. He’s used to not being caught, and he’s used to not being criticized for lying. He’s used to getting applause for it. “And I will always protect a woman’s right to choose, no matter what the mean-spirited challenge,” he says as his supporters cheer.

Once, about seven years ago, a friend of mine who is a Catholic-school teacher told me the way she sees it, a small lie is a drip of water on a rock. But small lies tend to bring more small lies, which bring more drips. Soon the drip is a torrent, and the torrent wears the rock away. That’s what you do to your character when you lie: You break it down and make it disappear. You make yourself into nothing.

That happens with politicians. It can happen with anybody. And it’s what, ultimately, puts us off about Al Gore. We know what the little lies mean.

*   *   *

An interesting thing happened at the dinner party. One of the women, a political figure, started banging away on the issue of abortion, saying that Mr. Bush will do away with Roe v. Wade.

“Someone should do away with it,” said a male voice. We looked. A second of silence. I can’t tell you how rarely one hears sentences like that at Manhattan dinner parties.

“What?” the woman said.

“It’s bad law!” he said. “I’m a Democrat, I’m pro-choice, but no one who has ever read the Roe-Wade decision respects it as law.”

“I respect it” says the woman.

“Have you ever read it?”

“Well no—”

“That’s why you respect it. Because you don’t know what it says, what it argues.”

He said the ruling was undemocratic, without basis in the law, that abortion should and eventually will be thrown back to the states, for each to decide.

“Why should that happen?” the woman demands.

“Because this is a democracy. Because that’s what a democracy is, we vote on these questions.”

She says, “What if there’s a poor woman in South Dakota who wants to get an abortion, she has to go to New York?”

“Maybe” he says. He adds that democracy can be uncomfortable and imperfect, but is still democracy.

“I don’t think it’s a democracy for poor women,” the union guy says. “They don’t have democracy!”

But they do, of course. And some poor women are pro-life. And their voices deserve to be heard too. And if Roe v. Wade is repealed one day, perhaps they will be.

But how interesting it was to see someone who is never challenged, and on an issue on which fierce and talkative women are rarely challenged, at least at dinner tables with crystal and silver and smart people and good food.

And to see her, to her credit, admit she’d never read the decision to which she has plighted her troth, and which she says means the most to her of all political issues!

But you know, when you stand up to those who are used to being in the majority, or used to being a member of an elite and in a majority—when you challenge them with facts, they often crumble like the facades on the Main Street of Potemkin Village: There’s nothing there, it was all front, nothing behind it.

*   *   *

On the way home from the stadium that opening night of the series, after the long game, in the dark, at 2 in the morning, we got off at the 86th Street station and walked for a while. The city was bright and happy in the darkness, and crowds of people and groups of families, dad and kids, dad and mom and sleeping six-year-old, made their way past us like affluent refugees, dragging their blankets and Yankee jackets. The city these days is, and has been for some years now, so sweet and gentle, and full of the possibility of joy.

They used to sing in the Sondheim years of a city of strangers, a lonely crowd of untethered dreamers going after empty dreams. All the grit and the crime and the pace—what a scary place it was. But that was long ago, 20 and 30 years. Now as then, “another hundred people just got off of the train” but now they join a city that sees itself, once again, as the empire of possibility. We are proud again of our town. New Yorkers of a certain age are shocked to find themselves sentimental when we see the lights like a string of pearls on the bridges that cross the rivers . . . or the skyline from Jersey . . . or when we see what color the lights on the Empire State Building are tonight, as we celebrate someone’s great day. St Patrick’s, Gay pride, Puerto Rican Day . . .

We are growing sweet in our hard-shouldered city. We even don’t wear those hard-shoulder Armani suits anymore, but have softer, natural shoulders, as if we no longer have to try to scare people on the streets with our size and strength. As if we no longer have to be Al Gore, but can be nice, like Rick Lazio. We are better to each other, and kinder to strangers. We have so much to be happy about. We are the luckiest fans on the face of the earth.

The third presidential debate was a public good, both informative and, once again, revealing of both presidential candidates. It seems to me that all three debates, now that they’re history, have been a paradoxical triumph: They were at times rote, stilted and even cringe-making, especially when Al Gore would take over and show his manly dominance, and Jim Lehrer would seem to shy away—”Don’t hit me!” And yet taken as a whole, all three debates had real power, made a real impact—so much so that I suspect when we look back on the election of 2000 the reigning cliché will be: It was settled in the debates.

*   *   *

All three made clear Mr. Gore’s central problems, one being that while it is certainly possible to respect his talents it is very hard for normal humans to like him.

And this is a very particular problem for him. After the third debate one of the whacked-out focus groups of supposedly undecided voters (really, has it not occurred to all in our great country that if focus-group undecideds actually decide then they won’t get to be on television anymore, and won’t be able to chat live with Tom, Dan and Brian?) threw out words to the moderator that described Mr. Gore. Among the words were “aggressive” “impolite” and “lacking in respect.”

Mr. Gore’s lack of courtesy is an old story of course, but it occurred to me as the focus group chattered that to a unique degree Mr. Gore’s affect—his demeanor and way of presenting himself—undercuts and puts the lie to the meaning of his whole campaign. Mr. Gore in his very Gorey-ness steps on and obliterates his own message. His lack of good nature becomes a lack of good faith.

The message of his campaign is: I will be just. But he can’t manage to be fair to George W. Bush. His message is: I will care about the weak. But then he smacks the easygoing and accommodating Mr. Bush on the head. His message is: I will be sensitive and kind. And then he attempts to menace and intimidate Mr. Bush by creeping up behind him and, as we say in New York, invading his space. Mr. Gore’s message is: I care for the little guy and not the powerful, and then in his power suit with the five foot shoulders he turns and looks with derision at the little guy Mr. Bush.

Voters absorb these things, and what they absorb coalesces into impression and, in time, hardens into opinion: “If this guy can’t manage to be courteous and good-natured to the courteous and good-natured man on the stool, why would he be good-natured and courteous to us?”

When people say of Mr. Gore that they don’t trust him and are asked to come up with why, they say things like, “He’s kind of a liar.” But they often don’t necessarily remember specific lies. What they’re remembering, I think, is the difference between what Mr. Gore says and how Mr. Gore acts. That’s the lie, the real one that haunts him.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush is no longer diffident, and no longer seems taken aback by Mr. Gore. In the cutaway shots, as he watched Mr. Gore Tuesday night, he wore a smile that seemed bemused and partly perplexed, like a younger actor watching an old-style actor eat the furniture and overact.

But the key moment, to me, was when Mr. Gore, who was supposed to be perched on his little stool, decided to get up and walk toward Mr. Bush as Mr. Bush answered a question—the invading-his-space moment. That moment was almost an exact replica of what Bill Clinton did to poor Bob Dole in debate. It unnerved Mr. Dole and sent him scurrying back to his podium for protection.

But Mr. Bush was not unnerved. He gave Mr. Gore a sideways double take, and the audience laughed. Mr. Menace looked foolish, Mr. Bush unfazed.

But that moment spoke to another thing that occurred to me last night. Mr. Gore was quite the actor, as usual. But all the stuff Mr. Gore does—the preacherman cadences, the sprayed, lifted, thickened hair, the posture disciplined, big chested and sucked in, the moderated strut, the exaggerated movements, the putting his hand UP when he says “revenues will increase” and sweeping his arm down when he says “taxes have DEE-creased,” the angling himself at a specific, preplanned point close to the bleachers and in front of both Mr. Bush and Mr. Lehrer, that made Mr. Bush seem a little shrimp in a chair and made it difficult for Mr. Lehrer to signal to Mr. Gore that his time was ending, and which put Mr. Gore Dominating the Camera Shot Like a Manly Man . . .

All of those tricks of the Clinton era, all that cleverness—suddenly as I watched, with admiration and disgust, suddenly I thought: It isn’t working anymore. It’s over. They’ve run it into the ground! Talking to normal humans afterward I thought: It doesn’t impress people anymore. After eight years they’re on to it. They’re bored with it.

And Mr. Bush, the ingenuous man-next-door, with his very lack of polish, his heartening normality, his sometimes awkward demeanor—Mr. Humblebumble seems the antidote to it, the antidote to Clintonian cleverness and savvy. And my sense is more and more people think: We need an antidote.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush may well have closed the deal in that last debate, as he made some progress in closing it in each of the first two. His positions are more in line with the majority of voters, a moderate conservatism that he is now able to explain and telegraph with a clear and commonly put argument that we don’t want to give people more government but more autonomy and freedom.

And his personality and character reinforce those positions. He is in his presentation, in his affect and demeanor, a reflection of his programs. He is respectful, moderate, commonsensical, courteous. He is, by nature, humorous and sort of joshing, but his jokes assume an equality of observation and experience—an equality, period.

*   *   *

The left will soon be saying, in a Gore loss, that it all came down to personality. It wasn’t Mr. Gore’s ideas that were wrong, it was the guy’s—charmlessness! This will be a replay of what they said when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter: It was charm.

But it is never charm. It is always philosophy as expressed through programs, plans and pronouncements. Still, when the speaker for a philosophy has a persona that enhances his ability to communicate his programs and plans, that means something. It makes a difference.

Mr. Bush does. Mr. Gore doesn’t.

The Republicans seem on an upswing, 20 days out, and one senses for the first time that it just might not be as close as everyone’s saying. Though of course elections can change on a dime (she said not at all self-protectively). Joe Lieberman the other night told Tim Russert there will be no October Surprise. One wonders if the surprise was supposed to be a Mideast peace, and that quite melted in the mists as the president for once seemed to get unlucky.

And there is Mr. Bush himself, who, when he’s ahead and when he can feel his own inevitability, has a way of unfocusing, sliding, making mistakes.

It will be an interesting few weeks but this observer feels she is about to see something she saw coming in the summer: a restoration.

Do you sense things are moving, immeasurably but perhaps decisively? I do.

George W. Bush not only won the debate Wednesday night, but in a way that damaged a central assumption of the Gore campaign. That assumption is that Mr. Bush doesn’t know very much. But Mr. Bush demonstrated that he knows a lot, and that his common-sense views and observations can be spoken in a common-sense language accessible to all. He sat back in his chair, spoke of America’s role in the world, and made it clear that that role should be grounded in moral modesty and strategic realism. He suggested that the various forces at work in the world should be met not with American hubris but with moderation, and with attention to the kind of example we can, as a great power, set. He seemed thoughtful, knowledgeable, and he buried the memory of the less-seasoned Gov. Bush who one day in Boston flailed when pressed by an interviewer who insisted he name the ruler of Pakistan.

But what must have been most painful for Al Gore was that Mr. Bush showed that in six years of government he has learned as much about government and policy as Mr. Gore has in 24 years.

He was Mr. Gore’s equal or better. He has come a long way as a candidate. By the end, I thought of something I hadn’t thought of in a while. About two years ago I saw George Shultz, a man of great judgment and experience who is both shrewd and wise. Mr. Shultz told me that George Bush, the Texas governor, would run for president, and that he was enthusiastically supporting him.

I was surprised. Isn’t Bush . . . young? I asked. He’s been governor for one term, is that enough experience?

Mr. Shultz’s eyes narrowed, and he shot me a look. I’ve spent time with him, he said. “He’s like Reagan. He’s got it.” He told me Mr. Bush had a Reaganesque understanding of the world and attitude toward it, and a Reaganesque charm to boot.

I was impressed. It was the moment I started to realize Mr. Bush was coming down the pike.

Watching Mr. Bush in the debate Wednesday night I remembered that conversation and thought: Now I am seeing what George Shultz saw.

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In the postdebate analysis Mr. Gore was called “anesthetized.” I found him only subdued, but that was not his problem. His problem was that he was so busy constraining his natural aggression, his desire to make himself big by making others small, that he spent all of his energy keeping himself in. And the space left by the absence of his aggression was not filled by warmth or humor or a philosophical turn. It wasn’t filled at all.

Or rather it wasn’t filled by Mr. Gore. It was filled by Mr. Bush—with his humor and warmth and a philosophical turn.

As a personality and in terms of character Bush is, of course, more attractive than Gore—more “normal”, more genuine and authentic and good natured.

It has been established already in this race that Mr. Gore tells a lot of lies, that he lies a lot even for a politician. But I think it has also been established that Mr. Bush not only does not lie but is probably incapable of lying. He is, transparently and simply, not a liar but a plainspoken teller of the truth as he is able to see it. This is a wonderful thing in anyone, and marvelous in a politician. A palpably honest man running for office in the Clinton era!

A friend of mine who is liberal and a Democrat sighs that Mr. Gore now seems like someone whose innards have been taken over by pod people; he is a robot, or something worse, something—Damien-like!

This is not a new thing to say. But my sense is that all of this, the Bush-knows-his-stuff part and the Gore-is-dishonest part, the Bush-is-a-good-man part and the Gore-is-another-weirdo part, has filtered down in the country in a way that is becoming decisive.

I think Mr. Bush has begun to win. Or rather Mr. Bush has begun to win again. In some immeasurable way he is moving forward, gaining ground, becoming seen by more and more people as a good man who can be a good president. This idea of Mr. Bush is driving forward, and the image of Mr. Gore as the next president is receding, shrinking back.

I think this in part not because of the second debate, but the first.

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In the first Bush-Gore debate most of the instant polls and those who chatter on television and write in newspapers, including me, said that Mr. Gore had won. Mr. Bush, to my mind, was not impressive, was on the defensive, did not follow through on his thoughts. That was pretty soon more or less the common wisdom—at least for a few days and at least among the chattering classes.

But only a week after that first debate, the common wisdom has changed. The first debate damaged Mr. Gore, we now know, and not Mr. Bush. It was Mr. Gore’s highhandedness, his smugness, the sighs and eye rolling. I had seen the highhandedness—everyone had—but I didn’t know it would be received by people as so obnoxious, and that it would ultimately prove so damaging.

People say it was the now-famous “Saturday Night Live” debate skit with the horrid Gore and the bumbling Bush that did it. But that skit didn’t give form to public opinion, it caught and reflected public opinion that had already jelled. And why did it jell so critically against Mr. Gore? That’s where guessing comes in, and here’s mine. People—more people than have been quantified by and spit out into the polls—don’t like Al Gore. They are looking for a reason to not vote for him. They want to like Mr. Bush. And if Mr. Bush, in the first debate, didn’t give enough reason to like him people were ready enough to respond to the reasons Al Gore gave them not to like him.

In the second debate, Mr. Bush gave plenty of reason to like him. And as Mr. Bush gives them more reasons to be for him they will continue to turn toward him, and the turning I think will be reflected in time in the polls.

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When George Bush the elder ran for president in 1988 after eight years as vice president in a stunningly successful administration—the biggest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history, the impending defeat of Soviet communism—Bush made an argument lifted from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 campaign. FDR, attempting to become America’s first three-term president as the winds of war swept east to west, said: “Don’t change horses in midstream.” George Bush in 1988 said: When you have to change horses in midstream, doesn’t it make sense to take the horse that’s going in the same direction?

Mr. Gore has been implicitly making that argument all year. My sense is it is not or is no longer taking. Because too many people think that in the case of Clinton-Gore, the horse didn’t take the stream, the stream carried the horse. The horse didn’t get us to the shore; Bill Clinton wasn’t the hardy cowboy who got us safely across. It was the stream itself—the stream of American invention and entrepreneurship—that pushed the horse across safely. When Mr. Gore makes his argument that he and Mr. Clinton created the new economy, I suspect more and more voters are coming to feel: I was the horse, and 100 million like me, and we made it across the stream carrying these two heavy guys who brag now about how well they wielded the whip.

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Some weeks back I called the race the battle of Dumb-Good vs. Evil-Smart. But I must tell you, I just spent five days in America. I left the island on which I live and journeyed through the continent, at least as far as Colorado, and then Indiana. And the strong impression I got is that more voters than I knew see this race more and more as a battle between Good Guy vs. Bad Guy. The idea that Mr. Gore is a phony, a creep, a dishonest guy who doesn’t know who he is, is out there. The idea that he’ll shape-shift and do and say anything to win is, simply, out there. And so is the idea—there is no polite way to say this—that he is not fully stable, that he is altogether as strange and disturbing as Bill Clinton.

As for Mr. Bush, in conversations with normal people I did not get the impression that they think he’s stupid. I got the impression they were debating and making their minds up about his policies. The most striking conversation I had was with an airport van driver, a big strapping mid-20s young man who wants to be a fireman. He told me he wasn’t sure whom he’d vote for. I told him that in a time of peace and plenty I’d expect a lot of people to vote for the incumbent, and I asked why he hadn’t committed to Mr. Gore. He looked over at me and said, with what seemed some embarassment, “I kind of get the impression he’s . . . a liar?” I asked why he hadn’t yet gone for Mr. Bush, then. He said he wasn’t sure Mr. Bush was right about tax cuts. It seemed clear to me though, the way he described how he saw both men, that his vote, ultimately, wouldn’t go to the liar.

No one knows of course, but my sense is that aversion to Al Gore is reaching some kind of critical mass, that the charge that he is a dishonest man at a time when we badly need an honest leader has taken hold, and that this is damaging to Mr. Gore to a greater degree than Bush-isn’t-smart-enough has been damaging for Mr. Bush.

I think Mr. Bush is winning, I think it’s happening day by day, and I think things will probably get real ugly real soon. The next presidential debate, next Tuesday, should be full of sparks and drama. Mr. Gore won’t be constrained next time; by now he’s decided the only way to take Mr. Bush is to pound him into the ground. He’ll go after Mr. Bush with knives and knuckles. People do what they know how to do, and that’s what he knows how to do.

We’ll see how Mr. Bush handles it. One thing about him Wednesday night: he sure didn’t look afraid. He didn’t look cowed. He looked happy. Like someone who knows something.

Candidates get better when they think they’re winning. Hillary Clinton has gotten better. She dominated yesterday’s debate. It was her show, with Rick Lazio playing a supporting role.

Mrs. Clinton spoke at her lectern with the fluidity and concentration of an Al Gore, unspooling her answers in full paragraphs, with each reply telling the story she wanted told. She presented herself as more in tune with the liberalism of New York, and in her final statement she did something I have never seen her do. Knowing that she was winning the debate, she uncoiled enough not to seem to be acting or reciting or manipulating but to seem to be sincere—and actually happy—as she gave a deft and effective tribute to the New York character, to what it means to be a New Yorker. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing that part over and over.

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Mr. Lazio and his people obviously game-planned his debate strategy with this in mind: Since he already has the anti-Hillary vote, he must now reach out with gentleness, with a more winning personality, to undecided voters who are thought to be uninterested in critiques of Clintonism. Moments after the debate ended, Gov. George Pataki said on CNN that Mr. Lazio was trying to get more voters to vote for him, rather than against Mrs. Clinton.

But this stance left Mr. Lazio in effect ruling out effective criticism, and not moving forward on rich target areas of attack. When moderator Marcia Kramer asked the candidates how they would respond to a U.S. Postal Service plan to put a five cent tax on each e-mail sent in America in order to recoup revenues lost to snail mail—an Internet hoax, not a real piece of legislation—Mrs. Clinton breezily told Ms. Kramer that, “based on your description,” she would not support the bill, that she thinks the Internet is a very promising development, and that she would take in general a wait-and-see attitude toward Internet taxation.

Mr. Lazio might have responded with an assertion of the difference between Mrs. Clinton’s views on taxation and his, and challenged her on her past support of her husband’s tax increases. He did not. He said he was against Internet taxation, and let it go.

Invited to elaborate on his past references on the stump to what is called the character issue, Mr. Lazio demurred, and instead spoke of his own history, accomplishments and character. Again, his strategy was obviously to make the case for himself and not the case against Mrs. Clinton. But the question remains: Can Mrs. Clinton be beaten in a state with five million registered Democrats and three million Republicans if her opponent does not focus on her history—again and again?

Mrs. Clinton seemed to anticipate Mr. Lazio’s Softness Strategy, and she made the best of it. At the beginning of the debate she referred in a challenging manner to his crossing the stage and approaching her with a soft-money ban in his hand. Thus she put him on the defensive for having, last debate, put her on the defensive. She challenged him also on the issue of trust, which in the past has been his issue against her—”Hillary Clinton—you just can’t trust her,” some of his most effective commercials have declared. But now she challenged him on breaking his own soft-money vow, which elicited from him his only clear, clean shot: “Mrs. Clinton, please—no lectures from Motel 1600 on campaign-finance reform.”

Mrs. Clinton was tough. She was also, almost invariably, smug. She seemed to know that Soft Rick wouldn’t body-slam her over her the Clinton administration’s failure to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution attacking Israel, and she used the question on it to stake out an assertion of her own independence. Pretty deft. She said Republicans “do not have the best interests of our country at heart,” and then claimed she is the real bipartisan candidate. She was not corrected. She seemed to know she would not be corrected. Mrs. Clinton now says “our” country where she used to say “the” country, and, when speaking of New York, goes out of her way to say “our” state, “our” roads, “our” bridges. (A friend of mine quipped: “our limos.”)

Mrs. Clinton’s primary problem continues to be an almost unrelenting charmlessness—a Nurse Ratched demeanor, a dead-eyed and rather joyless aggression that makes those who care about such things recoil. I say “almost” unrelenting, for at the close of the debate she showed an engagement that was almost charming.

*   *   *

By the end of the debate, in the cutaway shots of the audience, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters were smiling. Mr. Lazio’s seemed to be concentrating, thinking. And maybe planning the spin.

One senses right now, with less than a month to go before the election, that conservatives are on the defensive, finding it very difficult to break through and reach voters with the soundness of their arguments. Clinton-Gore-Clinton attacks on conservative heartlessness seem to me to be taking hold in some immeasurable way; and the Clinton-Gore spin that criticism of their derelictions, flaws, foibles and scandals is a “personal attack” and “the politics of personal destruction” seems also to have life in it, chiefly because the Republicans have thus far failed to refute it.

Nothing is over, almost four weeks remain, but in the sense that you’re either rising or falling, I do not have a sense that Mr. Lazio is rising.