Perhaps it's the morbid fascination which makes us unable to turn our eyes away when the coup de grace is administered to a wounded animal, but I watched the Vice President's concession speech. My personal distaste for him hasn't changed, nor has my profound objection to many of the policies he espoused, but I thought he did a good job. Whether it was a cynical show or a genuine realization of greater issues, he said the right things and acted like a better man than anything we saw from him during the campaign. The great irony of this speech is that had Al Gore been this personable and eloquent during the race, he might not be having to make a concession speech at all.

I stepped out onto the front porch to smoke a cigar after the vice president's speech and my oldest son came out with me. "We won," he said. "Yeah, but not by much," I answered. "Our guns are safe for four years," he said. "Maybe," I answered, "but I'm not taking anything for granted." I then proceeded to explain how our Second Amendment rights have taken some serious hits under the leadership of Republican presidents.

"A miss is as good as mile," says the old World War II proverb. The thrust of the saying is that the margin by which you miss the enemy or by which the enemy misses you doesn't matter. You're alive to fight another day, or the enemy is and you haven't done your job. For gun owners, this election was a miss which is as good as a mile--in both directions. We stopped the most rabid gun-grabber in the history of presidential politics from getting into the White House, but we didn't deliver a knock-out blow. I think that some of the Democrats may have gotten the message that they can't threaten the Second Amendment rights of American citizens and still expect to win elections, but there is that more radical group of gun prohibitionists who will rationalize and deny the impact of their extreme agenda on the ultimate failure of their standard bearer. The radicals like Sarah Brady and Josh Sugarmann won't internalize any of it. They'll be back. "A miss is as good as a mile." We've dodged a bullet, but not by much.

Our situation in the Senate has deteriorated with the loss of Ashcroft and Gorton. The margin in the House is narrow. We have a castrated legislature and president with less than a resounding mandate. Nevertheless, I still consider the election of 2000 to be a win. By all of the standard indicators, Gore should have won by a comfortable margin and he didn't. We have a president-elect who is far more friendly to gun owners than his predecessor. We have some things to be thankful for, but this is no time to get complacent.

Returning to the vice president, while I can't help but feel a twinge of sympathy for him, it made my skin crawl when I listened to him waving the flag and prattling about what it means to be an American. "Gee, Mr. Vice President, it's a shame you didn't get to read the Constitution a little earlier in the campaign." This was the part that struck me as most cynical: that even as the veep did the statesmanship show, his operatives were busy impugning the very institutions he claimed to affirm. While he waxed eloquent on unity, Jesse Jackson and Joe Andrews fanned the fires of racial paranoia, convincing many in the black community that somehow the machines had been rigged to reject black votes. Nor did the veep ever repudiate the basic lie that there was this great wad of ballots that had never been counted, when, in fact, every single ballot in Florida was counted twice by the machines with which they were intended to be counted, the same machines that helped elect Bill Clinton. The veep and his henchmen have done everything they could de-legitimize (if that's a word) the electoral process in Florida because they just couldn't believe that it didn't go their way and they saw an opportunity to "find" enough votes to do get a result denied to them by two legal counts. So it comes back around to that basic question of integrity and credibility. Al Gore lacks integrity in the sense of a person being integrated within himself. The Supreme Court didn't beat Al Gore, nor did the Florida court, Ralph Nader, the voting machines or a secret cabal of Republican election rustlers. Al Gore beat himself. That question of "will the real Al Gore please stand up," never was answered.

In the side of my mind where the demons sometimes roam, I think that it would have been more fun if the election would have gone the other way. It would have been more fun to torture Gore for selling America down the river than to watch Bush get the pounding that he will surely take. It will be far more crushing to see Bush let us down than to see Gore try to impose a socialist police state on our country. We know, more or less, what Gore would attempt to do. It seems to me that the opportunity for unpleasant surprises is exponentially higher with Bush than it would have been with Gore.

More than anything, I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of fuming at the Democrat spin meisters as they continue to try to impeach the election. I'm sick of the disappointment I feel that George W. didn't win a more substantial mandate. If we can take comfort in anything, it is that we have seen once again the peculiar genius of the American system and the Constitution we have sworn to protect. Justice Stevens said that the big loser in all of this was the courts and judges, but I think that was only his pink pajamas showing. The judges did their part. The voters did their part. The laws and Constitution did their part. We transferred power without bloodshed. We affirmed the institutions which form the basis of our civilization, and a whole new generation got the mother of all civics lessons (something the schools seem strangely reticent to do these days). There's a lot to be proud of and we've identified some things that need to be fixed so that this doesn't happen again. One thing you can say for sure is that this could only happen in America, and at least for tonight, "a miss is as good as a mile."