he moment has usually come and gone by now in past presidential campaigns, that dreaded moment when a trusted aide makes the long walk down a hotel hallway in some far-flung city and taps on the candidate's door.
The polling numbers are not good, the aide tells the candidate. The electoral votes don't add up any way we cut them. Barring a miracle or an unforeseen development, you have to prepare yourself to lose this campaign.
Defeat. For every contested race that someone wins today, whether it be for an office as finite as a New Hampshire legislative seat or as infinitely glorious as the presidency of the United States, someone else will lose.
So before we shut off the klieg lights, before the losing candidates head home tomorrow to pay overdue bills, play with their children, or rake a lawn covered with a season's worth of leaves, give them their due. Take a moment and give them your thanks.
Politics has become a contact sport, a blood sport, to use two cliches. Issues are personalized, opponents vilified, muck raked across the landscape of everyday lives. For every moment of virtue, there is the anticipation of a hidden vice. It has become the American way.
But it is the losers who inject the system with a dose of honesty, even if they are not necessarily honest themselves. It is the losers who make the winners - often the incumbents - accountable to the people they serve. It is the losers, by virtue of trying, who give us politics in all its majestic fullness. Without opposition there is only entitlement.
Thank Mitt Romney for forcing Ted Kennedy to tell us more about himself back in 1994, in what Kennedy yesterday called his favorite campaign. Thank John McCain for testing George W. Bush's mettle in the primaries, Bill Bradley for pushing Al Gore.
Losing is never easy. A few weeks ago, I called Mike Dukakis, who squandered a 17-point lead in 1988 to lose to George Bush. The man who stood on the doorstep of history answered his own office phone on the second ring. Two years ago, Hubert Humphrey's son lost the Minnesota governorship to a professional wrestler. This year, Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri might lose his reelection bid to a dead man.
Losing, though, gives us the formative experiences that allow for greatness - individually and as a republic. Losing provides us lessons in humility that victory never will. Losing measures fortitude and courage, wherewithal and depth.
In politics, unlike spurned love or lost promotions, defeat is uniquely, glaringly public. Cameras record every emotion; reporters too often forget or ignore that these are real people with real dreams.
But is there anything so magnificent as a gracious concession speech, anything else that so vividly reminds us of the true meaning of democracy, the acceptance of majority will? Some of the losers - Jack E. Robinson, for one - never deserved to win. Others will return victorious some day. To each and every one of them, thank you for what you've done.
If this campaign is Ted Kennedy's last hurrah, his final race, he's not saying. When I asked him yesterday whether the speculation that he might retire in six years was true, he laughed that exuberant Kennedy laugh and said, ''Have you been talking to my nieces and nephews?
''I've learned in life to make decisions as they come along,'' he added, sounding more serious. ''These last several years have been the most effective in the US Senate.''
He credits this year's cakewalk with a 1994 campaign that never stopped - and helped keep potential opponents on the sidelines. This race has been so easy that he spent much of yesterday with family rather than voters. His priorities in the coming term: prescription drugs and a patients' bill of rights.
Asked about his own health, he laughed again and said, ''Fine. There's just a little too much of me.''
Brian McGrory's e-mail address
is mcgrory@globe.com.
