As the great national nightmare known as the presidential campaign goes into its final preposterous convulsions and good citizens everywhere hold their heads and say, "Help! Help! I can't take it anymore," it is worth thinking about how we shall behave the day after the election.

Perhaps we should have a group hug.

In ordinary circumstances, I am not much for hugging. For me, it is a cultural thing, bred into me by a long, dour line of Victorian ancestors. The result today is that flamboyant people will sometimes catch me unawares and give me a friendly hug, only to come away with the impression that they have squeezed an ironing board.

Yet the hug-averse can be good people, too. No one in my family was a social hugger. My mother, privately a loving and sensitive person, used to develop a bogus coughing fit during that part of the church service where peace greetings were exchanged. She thought shaking hands with strangers might lead to an outbreak of unseemly hugging, which she knew to be a sin, even if the church did not officially recognize this.

Some people believe hugging is the measure of a man. I have seen an ad on TV that actually suggests we should re-elect President Bush simply because he gave a good hug.

In May, he hugged a young woman who had lost her mother in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Without a trace of sarcasm, let me say that Ashley Faulkner, now 16, deserved her hug more than anyone in the world and good for the president for comforting her. But even a President Henry, or a well-starched President Kerry, might have broken down and hugged her in those circumstances.

Speaking for the non-huggers of America, I do not begrudge Ashley a presidential hug, but I do have a problem with a TV ad that implicitly suggests that it trumps all other considerations, such as, you know, issues. Hey, that Bill Clinton liked to hug, although admittedly the targets of his affection were a little older.

And I always have a problem with people's natural sympathies being cynically exploited for political gain. It is politics as Hallmark moment.

The conservative group that sponsors this ad has created something so sickly sweet a viewer could contract diabetes just watching it. Cut onions positively ooze from the TV set and sentimental music plays. At any moment, the viewer expects bunny rabbits or puppies to make their appearance to tickle the old tear ducts so that the salty torrent will wash us down to the polling booth to vote Republican.

Have we become such morons?

Enough of asking the obvious: I concede that hugging has its place -- it is, after all, the traditional way of enlivening Saturday nights. So I am prepared to put aside my cultural reservations on Nov. 3 and call for a group hug to bring the American people together.

On that day we should know -- the Lord and the state of Florida willing -- whether, to paraphrase Lincoln, a government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations shall perish from the Earth. Or not.

The saddest words of tongue or pen are supposed to be "It might have been!" but I have heard sadder things this election season. There was the Republican true believer who wrote to me and observed that she and her husband tried to avoid Democrats in social settings as much as possible. There was a Democratic friend who said that while she wouldn't shun anyone who voted for George Bush, she would never look at the person in the same light again.

These attitudes are plainly nuts. Quick, form the hug circle. I'll join you as soon as I have said a prayer and asked forgiveness of my dearly departed mother.

The first step to reconciliation on that fateful post-election day will be to consider the positive outcome of the defeat of our own favored candidate. Yes, yes, I know we have trained ourselves to think of the doomsday scenarios of what happens when the other guy wins -- for liberals, that would be Justice Genghis Khan on the Supreme Court; for conservatives, compulsory gay marriage for all.

But to quote the fish in "The Cat in the Hat": "This mess is so big / And so deep and so tall, / We cannot pick it up. / There is no way at all!"

It would be fun to see the guy we didn't vote for trying to pick up this mess. For some of us, it might be more fun than a hug.