obody ''deserves'' to be president, a small fact that has been widely ignored this past week in the nation's angst bath.
But anybody has a right to be unhappy with an election outcome. Feel free. No trend, direction, mandate, or issue was endorsed or rejected. Whichever president we end up with, half the country will feel cheated. The we-wuz-robbed caucus approacheth 50 percent. The center does not hold very much at all.
So we stagger into the millennium with the half-baked results we got. We'll survive. You think maybe the country's seen worse years than the one ahead? 1968, maybe? '63? '74? '41? I'll take 2001, hands-down, over any one of those beauties.
By this time next week, probably by Friday night, when those bewildered and bewildering election officials in Florida get their act together, we'll have a president-elect. My guess is it will be Bush Jr. I admit to the same sort of sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach that I had when his daddy was elected 12 years ago. Read my lips: I don't expect much.
But I expect the Florida absentee votes will slide Bush Jr.'s way, and I expect the pressure will be enormous on Al Gore to bow out gracefully. Which I expect him to do.
For the Gore crowd - I voted for the VP - I suggest you dwell on these uncomfortable facts: Your guy turned people off by the millions. His mien and manner and mind games, his sighs and wordiness and wardrobe changes, all of the window dressing distracted from his presentation of a first-class mind with a deep and abiding grasp of issues.
We cannot ignore that he lost his home state, albeit by barely 4 percent, or 78,000 votes. Take Tennessee's 11 electoral votes from Bush and give them to Gore, and Albert is president-elect today. But Rule One of electioneering is you have to secure your base, and Rule One-A is your base starts at home.
Gore lost Tennessee - and the rest of the South, if Florida's result holds - because of guns, gays, abortion, born-agains, and mistrust of the same federal establishment that lit up the hollers and backwoods of Tennessee with federal electricity, and kept all those old people alive in their tarpaper shacks with Social Security.
Tennessee has gone conservative and Republican in the 25 years Al Gore's been living in D.C. White males rule there; and white males vote Republican everywhere, but most especially in the South. The most telling nugget I turned over in Tuesday's midden-heap of exit polls was this: When Southern voters were asked if they had a gun in their household, two out of three Republican voters said yes, to only one of three Democrats.
The Bush who went to Bob Jones University to bury John McCain won the fundamentalist Christian vote, along with the Roman Catholics who heeded the clergy's demand to vote against abortion, but ignored the same church's opposition to capital punishment. Blacks turned out big for the Democrats, again, but whites, particularly in the South and Mountain States, were too heavy for Bush.
Lyndon B. Johnson's private lament to Bill Moyers in 1965, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, is still reverberating: By giving blacks their constitutional rights, Democrats assured themselves of losing the white vote for generations.
The beneficiaries have been the Sun Belt Commandos who rode in with Reagan and Bush Sr. and now with Junior. For my fellow Massachusetts voters, all I can say is, this state voted 60 to 32 percent against the Bush-person. Now it is time to swallow the national result. Bear in mind that we have not elected a Northerner since JFK, 40 years ago last week. Every elected president since (LBJ, Nixon, not-Ford-because-he-was-not-elected, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton) was from the South or West.
The center of gravity of political power has slid away from the Northeast. Bush Jr. just lost everything north of Virginia, save quirky New Hampshire. And he'd have lost the whole left coast were it not for Ralph Nadir (sorry, Nader) in Oregon.
But the rest of the country? Save for the Midwest states that went for Gore (Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan), this is a pretty conservative country, mistrustful of Washington, of government, of the media. You sing the siren song of tax cuts in those vast and largely-empty spaces, and the lure of easy money works every time (Reagan, Reagan, Bush One, and now Bush Two). And when it comes to guns, they forgot Columbine and remembered Charlton (Heston, of the NRA).
So to all my Democrat and liberal friends who are furious over the chicanery and incompetence and foolish behavior in Florida, I say: I feel your pain. But I cannot share the demands of those who seek wider recounts, or reelections, or recampaigning. Count the overseas ballots those nitwits in Florida allow, finish the tally by 5 p.m. Friday, announce the result, and then let the winner win and the loser lose, gracefully.
I have longstanding and genuine doubts that the Bush camp, which ran negative all year, will suddenly turn toward the sweetness and the light. I have more faith that Gore will concede, if the absentee ballots so dictate, in a graceful and healing manner. But it's easier to win than to lose, so maybe Bush can suck it up and accept his shredded mandate in something approaching a becoming fashion.
His will be a staff-driven presidency, off his meager record, with option papers no longer than a page or two to hold his wandering attention span. Is it too much to expect that the congressional leadership, of both parties, will somehow come to common cause in propping up the least-experienced president in memory - living or dead memory? Yep, it probably does ask too much of the men who've made Washington the swamp of impeachment, shutdown, imbroglio, and partisanship.
To those Bush voters who honestly believe that the tone and tenor and truthfulness of Washington will somehow improve over the next four years with your guy in, I find your faith touching. I hope you are right. It looks to me as if you'll have a chance to see if you are. I wish us all luck.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
