Peggy Noonan

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.

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.)

*   *   *

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.”

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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.