The odds are you won’t be seeing anything like that Achesonian ice in Washington as the recent combatants in an extremely bloody presidential election-along with their families and political staffs-get together for a little transition talk and reconciliation. There will be smiles, tours of the White House living quarters, a few wry jokes, some heartfelt pledges of cooperation and thanks for being so helpful. Bygones, in other words, will be officially declared bygones; that will be that. Now, on to a more glorious tomorrow …

I have mixed feelings about all this. There are respects in which it is indisputably good. Our democratic system requires that the losers not barricade themselves in the presidential palace like resisting princelings and that the winners not behead them. It may not do for every country, but it is our way. And, by tradition, presidential power most often changes hands not only peacefully but (whatever the participants’ mental reservations) with an almost ostentatious affability, a kind of relentlessly beaming good sportsmanship on the part of the loser and good will on the part of the one who brought him down.

This is certainly a useful practice, if not necessarily plausible as true emotion. It makes the government work better and is in fact part of a more general pattern of behavior for which Washington is known and habitually condemned: the personal getting along of people who spend their working hours in ferocious political and professional combat. It appears hypocritical and corrupt to many outside ‘politics or outside Washington or both. But the truth is that no individual issue, no matter how great its importance or extensive its reach, covers everything a public person must be concerned with. There are always other issues. People who were adversaries on matter (a) may need to work together on matter (b). At a minimum they need to maintain a degree of civility sufficient to get the work done. Nor does it hurt to get to know each other and understand better what the other one is thinking. If people in public office allowed themselves to treat intense political opposition as personal affront, then absolutely nothing would get done.

Still, there is a downside. The “hell, it’s only politics” justification for forgiving and forgetting personal assaults that are particularly vicious, unfair and untrue amounts to sanctioning them. There is something wrong about the affected bonhomie that is expected to come into play almost instantaneously when an election result is known. It says: it was-is-all right to play the game that way. It says: that was then, this is now (a full five minutes having passed). It says: only kidding, folks; hey, you didn’t think I meant all that stuff?

It is interesting to me that as our campaigns get more and more mean-minded, assaultive, personal, scurrilous and nasty, we seem to develop more and more ways of evading the reality of what is going on. We talk these days of “negative campaigning,” of “going negative”-bland euphemisms that may be used to cover a lot of practices that, given their real names, we would thoroughly disapprove. You can’t very well say in polite company that the candidate has decided the only way he can win is to lie, insinuate, unfairly discredit his opponent, etc. But you can respectably say he has decided he has to “go negative.” It sounds downright scientific, political professionalism at work.

And candidates, having insulated themselves against any obligation to face up to what they are doing by using all this self-protective chatter about “negative” this and that, cheerfully read out the hate lines and wonder why some people, who are still in what you might call the taking-words-seriously mode, get so upset. I found the most amazing thing George Bush said about Bill Clinton during the campaign the sentence “I like him.” This was duly reported (“Bush Says He Likes Clinton”) as if it were merely an interesting truth, not an evident hallucination. I mean, here is a man that Bush & Co. have been portraying as a liar, a sneak, a coward, a dupe (and perhaps much worse) of the enemy, a habitually untrustworthy human being and one who is careless of and indifferent to his country’s interests and he says he likes the man. What on earth is the message meant to be? I think it can only be that we are not to take Bush at his word about all of Clinton’s terrible characteristics, or else that Bush has pretty odd taste in people.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an exclusively Republican or conservative or even George Bush phenomenon. Plenty of Democratic liberals have flung charges of racism around just as recklessly, and there was a time when all who disagreed with the conventional liberal wisdom on the war in Vietnam or how we should deal with the Soviet Union were accused of every manner of moral corruption and psychological deformity. And I don’t say that Bush didn’t take some unfair knocks in this campaign. But he was, by his own strategists’ account, the one on a personal search-and-destroy mission, and it is he, with his immediate transformation into Mr. Nice Guy, the friendly transitionmeister, who best reflects the strangeness of our ways.

I think they are not harmless. Surely we don’t want to get to a place where we are comfortable in accepting that anything at all can be said about an opponent in politics, no matter how unfair, damaging and untrue, only to be chucked aside the day after the vote as empty political talk. Wasn’t this supposed to be the new age in which people had had it up to here with politicians telling them things they didn’t really believe? I can’t imagine that voters who are newly determined to hold candidates responsible for the positive words they utter during campaigns-the pledges and promises-don’t consider them equally responsible for the veracity and fairness of what they say about their opponents.