DEMOCRATS have Kennedy nostalgia, great gusts of longing for their last president who was not a public embarrassment of one kind or another, and their last burst of mid-century glory, before the ceiling fell in on the party. Republicans have Reagan nostalgia, pangs for what seems, at least in the telling and retrospect, an unparalleled moment of clarity. And now some liberals have developed nostalgia for Albert Gore Jr., for a presidency that should have been but never was, a lost cause that died, not on the killing fields of Culloden or Gettysburg, but in the counting rooms of Broward County, and the dueling chambers of the Supreme Courts of Florida and the United States. All lost causes glimmer darkly with unfulfilled promise, and all have their heroes. And so, along with Marse Robert and Bonnie Prince Charlie, we now have Bonnie Prince Al.

Reagan and Kennedy were actually elected, and thus had real presidencies, tarnished with failures and lapses of judgment, such as Iran-Contra and the Bay of Pigs. Prince Al on the other hand has just an imagined one, which plays itself out as alternative history, a place where, in the minds of his vassals, nothing can ever go wrong. These visions are hauled out as weapons against President Bush–who as a real president has real wins and real losses–as “proof” that in the Gore version, there would have been nothing but wins.