Readers react to the election

I'VE WRITTEN dozens of columns about the presidential campaign since it started, seemingly sometime back in the Kennedy administration. So today, I'm giving equal time to some of my readers.

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One of the advantages of e-mail is that, as a columnist, you hear from scores of people with strong thoughts about your own opinion.

Well, actually, let's call it a mixed blessing.

Some on both the right and the left seem unable to disagree without being disagreeable. For them, e-mail argumentation doesn't rise above flinging insults.

But many others are smart, thoughtful, and civil - even when they think you're wide of the mark on something. And so, as the presidential postmortem gets underway, here are some of their views about the election.

William Brennan, a regular e-mailer from Virginia, thought the results were really about the rejection of a region and a persona.

''Bush was able to shed his preppy background and yet exploit Kerry's,'' wrote Brennan, who voted for the Republican last time but supported Kerry this time around. ''It was not the Massachusetts liberal label that sunk Kerry - rather that was code for Eastern liberal establishment. . . The rest of the country is sick of the old guard prepping its small number of progeny in New England prep schools and Ivy League colleges, especially the big two.''

His political prescription: ''The leader of the Democratic Party must come from the Mid-Atlantic states or the upper middle west.''

But another puckish voter said he saw no need whatsoever for the Democrats to cast about for a candidate from a different region of the country - and indeed, hoped that they wouldn't.

''As a conservative Republican, I just pray the Democratic Party continues to run left-wing liberals from the Northeast,'' wrote Dr. Robert Noble, from Mississippi, who added: ''People from the Northeast do not understand us and we do not understand the [Northeast] nor the left coast. We land-owning 'hay seeds' take issue with the elitist snobbery shown us by people in the Northeast.''

One dispirited Kerry supporter fretted that a wave of religiosity had eroded time-honored civic principles.

''The Bible trumps the Constitution and Bill of Rights, doesn't it?'' she wrote. ''We have a religious civil war in this country and . . . . We're outnumbered! The Reds' positions are intractable.''

It's a basic tendency of partisans on both sides to assume that people who disagree with them are their intellectual inferiors. And indeed, a number of people disappointed with the outcome saw either an IQ or an educational deficit in Bush voters.

''Our country has dumbed-down to such a degree that George Bush received more voters than any other president,'' wrote Frank Dundee from Ohio. ''To me that is the tipping point of the United States' almost 100-year reign at the top. . . Bush's election proves that in the Valley of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king. America has turned into a place where I reside. It used to be much more.''   Continued...