The familiar hypocrisy.

The election gods will have their little jokes won't they? Last month we noticed the irony of brainy Al Gore's desperate appeal on behalf of a putative army of disenfranchised Morons for Gore in Palm Beach County, Florida, for a second chance to register their supposed preference for him, the instructions on the original ballot having proven too difficult for them to understand. Since then we have seen another bit of cosmic humor in the fact that, in the great "dimpled chad" battle, the Bush forces' appeal to law and precedent in arguing that such doubtful votes should not be counted was slightly marred by the fact that the one and only state in which such votes are counted is Texas--and that Governor George W. Bush himself was the man whose signature made it lawful to count them.

But the best joke of all has been in the juxtaposition of the two parties' arguments in every other court case in the seemingly unending struggle for the White House and in that which they adopted in the suits by Democratic voters against election officials in Seminole and Martin counties for allowing Republican Party representatives to fill in voter identification numbers on applications for absentee ballots. Not only in court but also in a fevered round of television appearances, Gore had passionately insisted that "every vote must count"--even when it was far from clear that there were in fact any uncounted votes--in the heavily Democratic counties of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. Republicans, wherever possible avoiding the question of what constituted a vote, insisted on following the rules as laid down in Florida election law, particularly with respect to machine recounts and deadlines for certification.

All that seems straightforward enough. But in the Seminole and Martin counties cases, the parties' positions were reversed, the Republicans arguing that a technical violation of the rules in those counties should not result in a disqualification of the voters while the Democrats thought that the whole lot of absentee ballots should be thrown out. Thus a Republican lawyer in the Seminole County trial, Terry Young, told Judge Nikki Ann Clark with an almost Gore-like solemnity that "A ballot is not just a piece of paper. It is a voice--and a voice that, at all costs, should not be silenced." Meanwhile, the Democratic lawyer, Gerald F. Richman, argued that the Republican insertion of identification numbers on ballot applications from which they had been omitted by a printer's error had amounted to the defilement of "the sanctity of the ballot." Presumably there was no such defilement in Democratic election officials' holding ballots up to the light to find anything that could be construed as a mark of intention to vote for Gore.

Of course, it was hardly coincidental that the only consistency on either side of this comic pas de deux was that both of the contradictory positions each side was trying to maintain would have resulted in the most favorable outcome for its candidate. That, we might say, is just politics, if no less comical for that. The whole thing would have been a rich and satisfying comedy even without the appearance outside the courtroom of Republican demonstrators from Seminole County chanting "Count my vote!" just as pro-Gore demonstrators had done in Palm Beach and Dade counties three weeks earlier.

But what should have made for gaiety and mirth across the nation did not do so. The laughter died on the lips of earnest partisans oddly desperate to see their man win in spite of the objectively small degree of difference between the candidates. Nowhere was this more true than among media people, even though they had every reason to take a more detached view. Not only, that is, do they make a veritable shibboleth of their detachment and objectivity but, in spite of the Democratic sympathies which those qualifies, in fact, mask, they don't even like Gore very much. Nobody, with the possible exception of his family and closest friends, likes Gore very much.

Just look at the extra helping of phoniness he brought to the common or garden variety of political hypocrisy mentioned above. Throughout his political career, he has been particularly reckless in daring the thunderbolts that the immortals reserve for the most brazen hypocrisies. So, in 1996, he had the sheer brass neck to tell the Democratic conventioneers assembled in Chicago of his undying hatred of the tobacco industry, born of his sister's death from lung cancer, when there was on his public record an unambiguous bit of pandering to employees of the same industry and dating years after his sister's death. His shameless use of his family for political purposes, as in the case of his son's accident at the 1992 convention or his passionate kiss of the charming "Tipper" at the 2000 convention, would hardly be so irksome if he didn't so resolutely pretend, with the annoying piety of which he is the acknowledged master, that he was doing no such thing.

At this point he had characteristically gone so far overboard in protesting the disinterestedness of his civic-minded concern that the voters' voices should be heard--almost seeming to suggest that he really had no interest in the matter and could scarcely care less about his own fate if only this sacred principle could be upheld by the recalcitrant courts--that he was beginning to be mocked for it in the press even before he publicly reversed himself and lent his support to the suits in Seminole and Martin counties. Up until the day before Judge Clark heard evidence in the Seminole county suit, the Gore team had been insisting on the decorum of their fig-leaf, that in fact the suits were nothing to do with them but entirely the idea of local Democrats. But that was also the day after his flagship suit attempting to force a recount of the disputed counties had been (as it seemed at the time) sent to the bottom with all hands by Judge N. Sanders Sauls. When it began to look as if his only remaining hope was to disenfranchise all 15,000 of the innocent absentee voters of Seminole County, Gore didn't hesitate: