From the night of the election, when Al Gore's campaign manager Bill Daley strode to the podium to announce "The campaign continues," Al Gore has taken his plays right from Bill Clinton's impeachment playbook. Fuggedabout the rules of decorum. Lie if you have to, and you will have to. Trash your opponents. The public needs a villain to rally around your cause. Focus attention on large, mindlessly repeated slogans and away from grubby little facts. Do not worry about making your actions fit your words, and don't worry about the letter of the law, either. Most Americans are not watching all that closely.
Why didn't it work? Gore must be scratching his head, You won the national vote, he told himself in the middle of the dark night; Americans will rally to your side.
Except they didn't. The big mistake Gore made is not recognizing that Americans are deeply committed to neither him nor President-elect Bush. We are committed to the fundamental decency of this country's way of life and resentful of those who call the respectability of basic institutions (like the office of the presidency in the impeachment case, or the legitimacy of our established election procedures in Gore's case) into needless, hostile, partisan question.
Conversely, Republicans, smarting from the failure of the American people to repudiate what they (and I) saw as serious violations of law in the Clinton impeachment trial, are almost surprised to find their darkest fears about the meltdown of the rule of law have not come true: The Florida courts are not a cabal paid for by the Democrat Party. America still is what we always imagined it to be: the world's finest democracy, whose fundamental strength and core decency shine through the mud flung as a result of one man's frustrated personal ambition.