Are you cheering for all this bipartisanship yet? Do you want to stand up and applaud policy agreements on things you didn't even want? Come on, George W. Bush has been president for one whole day. Everything has changed now. Democrats are going to be different than the Republicans have been for the last eight years. Walk down any street and smell the bipartisanship ... No, that's not bipartisanship. A gopher died or something. Try again ... SMELL IT! ... OK, I'm sorry I yelled. But try ...

Apparently the only problem with this new era of political consensus is that the public doesn't actually want it. Talk to your friends. Check your unsolicited crank e-mails. Start a conversation by standing in the middle of an American Legion Hall and yelling, “Hillary Clinton!” You never will hear anyone say, “I want my side to give in,” or, “I voted for my candidate so he would compromise with people I hate.”

No, this is what you'll get. From the right, I now quote more or less at random from Rush Limbaugh's Web page:

“By voting 92 percent for Algore [sic], blacks have given up any leverage that they might have had within the GOP and with George W. Bush. I must note here that Bush is not acting this way ..., but he could. In the political sense, he could say, `You guys didn't vote for me at all, so I really don't have a duty to listen to your demands.'”

Apparently Limbaugh believes that political alliances give Bush the right to sneer at and ignore – there is no other way to interpret this – the vast majority of black people. Consensus, for Limbaugh and many others, means having everybody swing to the right.

On the left wing, newspapers up and down Florida still are counting the votes from November. The Palm Beach Post tallied all the uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County and concluded that Bush would have pulled ahead by six more votes, to which the Post comments, “That result would have been a hard blow to Al Gore's hopes of claiming the presidency in a recount.”

This sounds like a report from an alternative universe in which the election is still going on. Two years from now, we'll be reading about the Mideast summit that Gore would have been having right about then, and perhaps also bemoaning how much easier it would be to fix the clutch on a Peugeot if Napoleon III had won the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

But nothing better illustrates the current milieu than the tribulations of Alec Baldwin.

To set the record straight: Baldwin never actually told a reporter he would leave the country if George W. Bush became president. What's reported is that the actor's wife, Kim Bassinger, told a German magazine he had said this. If he did, it was a private conversation, and thankfully it is still legal in this country to say asinine things to your wife.

Nonetheless, so many people sent threatening e-mails to Baldwin that he had to close down the feedback section of his Web page. The Internet is crashing from all the people asking him to keep his “promise,” and saying Barbra Streisand, Robert Altman and a lot of other Hollywood leftists – whose threats to leave also cannot be confirmed – ought to get packing while the air rates still are good.

With so many people being asked to leave the country because they disagree with the right wing, I keep thinking Joe McCarthy is sitting at a computer somewhere, wearing nothing but black socks and a bathrobe, occasionally bidding on ebay for a camouflage hat.

But Baldwin's alleged statement and the reaction to it do show that the American people hold some serious, if occasionally unhinged, beliefs – and we want our politicians to represent them. If we didn't feel that way, there'd be no reason to vote at all.

And if there's no reason to vote, then to heck with it. We might as well just end the 2000 election right now.