Tough Love

In the days before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the Op-Ed page asked writers from each state to report on the race. Here are their final dispatches.

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Read Allan Gurganus's Second Dispatch (May 4, 2008) Read Allan Gurganus's First Dispatch (May 1, 2008) Related Op-Ed Contributor: Feeling Blue in Indiana (May 6, 2008) if (acm.rc) acm.rc.write();

Hillsborough, N.C.

THE Secret Service confiscated our umbrellas. No candidate was ever threatened here. Among curbside campaign signs months old, pink peonies now start to open, clashing with stars and bars.

Today I hear our village cleaning house after the Obama-Clinton party. We’re glad to be busy, waiting for results. If plain local Democrats feel this freed, imagine the candidates’ relief. Bath salts, masseurs, angelic choirs, nothing is too good for them tonight.

During their last days here, two senators with similar views began speaking only kindly of each other’s values. But their contest pushed at least two local marriages several red states nearer Reno. Some divorces force you to take sides. In this one, at all costs, locals strongly favor either the man or the woman.

Improbable couple, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They are one, though! We all know such pairs: “Love him, hate her!” Vice versa. For decades we fake equal chumminess. And that’s how many of us feel today about this national spat. Whom do I favor? It is rolling mercury; it shape-shifts fast from him to her to him. Not even they know where all of this will end.

But, maybe you’d prefer Dick Cheney? Or another four-year sentence under George W. Bush’s next hired-gun? Somehow, we let ourselves be pulled into a dark, dark woods. And now, who — no, which — will lead us out?

We must therefore ask our self-sacrificial senators for one huge final favor. (John Edwards, you say? During his home-state primary, he held onto his few remaining votes instead of playing marbles. His gigantic new house hosted no one. Mr. Edwards had taken his children to Disneyland.)

So, after you’ve rested, dear leading candidates, could you simply catalog the wounds you each had to inflict upon the other? Read Psalm 100: “It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.” Then, having blamed the system, try forgiving each other those surface scratches. Some were self-inflicted. And could you next — without your “people” present, without even (gulp) your own dynamic spouses — meet in a hotel suite and simply sit there, without microphones on, without even your shoes on, and talk?

Would the both of you smarties please figure out how we, as a country in its deepest trouble since Pearl Harbor, might find some peace at last? How can we save the tatters of our oil-stained national soul? Think. Pretty please?

In my 1965 high school student council race, the leading candidates exactly tied. We simply called them co-presidents. They did great. (Of course, your mates will have their own sense of this particular geometry, with its titles, etc. Euclid might be needed as consultant.) But listening must be possible for two such questing mortal superpowers. You’ve just used up several lifetimes’ energy getting to the starting line beside a crouched John McCain. Please look right at each other. Oh, to hear you finally say: “Hi. Well done, well run. So, what is next for us?”

Us! Can this marriage be saved? Can our Union?

You two, show us how.

Allan Gurganus is the author of "Plays Well With Others."