know this election was supposed to be high-tech, but what I'll remember about the Super Tuesday night of the year 2000 is the skirl of the bagpipes, the lowest-tech music since the drum.
A half-hour before the polls closed, I whipped into the Florian Hall parking lot. The hall is the redoubtable meeting place and drinking spot of off-duty firefighters, and two things were happening. Florian Hall is a Dorchester ward polling place thanks to the city's beneficence and the firefighters' union clout, so the normal end-of-the-day voting habits of Dorchester were taking place. But it was also the gathering spot of the McCain victory party, and of victory, in Massachusetts at least, there was no doubt for the crew that the Dorchester Reporter's Billy Forry branded ''McCainiacs.'' Not since Ronald Reagan has working-class Dorchester so embraced a Republican as McCain, the feisty ex-POW with the attitude.
The crowd was at the bar before I got there. The band was warming up. The TV people were milling, and network anchorpeople were gingerly trying to inject sly hints about outcomes based on elaborate exit poll data they pored over in private but were afraid to cite in public. But outside, where a preternaturally warm dusk had ushered in a balmy early-spring evening, the keening of the bagpiper wafted in on a southeast breeze. The music was distant and sad and so sweet as to bring tears.
McCain was the man for Massachusetts, as he was in Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, but the governor of Texas took Maine. George W. Bush, the man of money, the establishment, the boss's son, the candidate of negative ads and back-door bag jobs, won the nomination last night, to the surprise of no one in Florian Hall, where politics is no stranger.
You could vote for McCain, wander next door, pick up the gleanings from network chatter, have a beer, talk to a stranger, and bask in the knowledge that you had voted for an American hero. It was not your typical Republican victory night crowd.
There were World War II vets in full regalia, young college types swept up in the McCain phenomenon, working-class Democrats happy to have a guy to look up to, defecting Democrats who'll probably be with Al Gore in November. But one thing there was no evidence of in Florian Hall was anyone with a scintilla of regret for turning out and turning up for a guy who is a bold and brassy warrior. McCain's was the Braveheart campaign, a crusade against huge odds with remarkable early success. Bush won, that's the bottom line. But John McCain's crowd has no whimperers. Their guy is their model: You may be beaten, but if you're tough enough, you can't be licked.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
