PARTY TALK.

"Saturday Night Live" is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a "message from the President of the United States," and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:

In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was "down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars." The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. ("I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.") After winning the plaudits of a grateful world--and turning Afghanistan into a premier "spring-break destination"--Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of "getting hugged." Even the national pastime was in danger. "But," Gore added hopefully, "I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, 'We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!' "

The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate. The attacks of September 11, 2001, would likely not have been avoided, though there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his. But can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say, American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq; the fate of the earth, not the fate of oilcompany executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency; civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision; torture found no place or rationale?

In increasing numbers, poll results imply, Americans are disheartened by the real and existing Presidency, and no small number also feel regret that Gore--the winner in 2000 of the popular vote by more than half a million ballots, the almost certain winner of any reasonable or consistent count in the state of Florida--ended up the target of what it is not an exaggeration to call a judicial coup d'etat. Justice Antonin Scalia routinely instructs those who question his vote in Bush v. Gore to stop their ceaseless whinging. "It's water over the deck," he told an audience at Iona College last month. "Get over it." But it is neither possible nor wise to "get over it." The historical damage is too profound.

And yet, despite the burden of injury and injustice, Gore, more than any other major Democratic Party figure, including the many candidates assembled for next year's Presidential nomination, has demonstrated in opposition precisely the quality of judgment that Bush has lacked in office. Gore's critiques of the Administration's rush to war in Iraq and of the deceptions used to justify it were early, brave, and correct. On the issue of climate change, of course, he has exercised visionary ...