On the morning after, the shopkeepers of Canal St. rolled up their steel doors and brought out their goods. The man who sells coffee, bagels and Danish was on the corner at first light. Young people hurried to offices, talking on cell phones.

But there was a sense among some New Yorkers that the results of the elections could lead to calamity.

President Bush and the Republicans now control all three branches of government: the executive branch, of course, but the Congress, too, along with the Supreme Court that appointed Bush President. The right wing of American politics is triumphant.

"My opinion?" one woman said to me yesterday. "My opinion is it scares the crap out of me."

Certainly, grim scenarios were floating around the town on Election Night and were worse on the morning after. They were not knee-jerk liberal scripts.

The election, after all, ended any possibility of restraining the right-wing agenda of the Bush hard-liners.

How can there be checks and balances when one party controls all three branches of government?

The Bushies want a war in Iraq, and they will now almost surely get one. They will win the great prize: Iraqi oil. It doesn't matter much to them if a few thousand American soldiers die, or several hundred thousand Iraqis.

They don't care if they wreck the United Nations in the process, because they despise the UN.

Baghdad, here we come

So they will go to Iraq, one way or another. Even if someone murders Saddam Hussein first, they will go into Baghdad, claiming to be searching for those weapons of mass destruction.

They will not do the same in North Korea, of course, because North Korea has no oil. In Baghdad, they will make speeches about democracy and stabilization of the region. But away from microphones, they will be discussing the number of barrels per day the new regime can produce.

At the same time, the Bush people will be pushing their domestic agenda: more tax breaks for the rich, an end to stem-cell research, spreading the local graft of the faith-based initiative.

That is, they will start the 2004 campaign.

They will use homeland security as an excuse to curb more civil liberties.

They will push their right-wing candidates for judgeships, to maintain ideological control of the judicial branch for a generation. For the same reason, they will nominate other right-wingers to fill impending vacancies on the Supreme Court.

The pathetic Democrats helped make all this possible. They mourned the death of Paul Wellstone, but very few of them displayed his guts.

On Iraq, the Democrats handed Bush what he wanted: a new version of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that allowed President Lyndon Johnson to widen the war in Vietnam into an American disaster.

Dems rolled over

Bush now has the option to wage war on Iraq, without argument from the timid Democrats. Even the best of them voted him these powers, including New York's Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

"They disgraced themselves with that Iraq vote," one political type said at Carl McCall's headquarters on Election Night. "That turned a lot of people off."

When potential voters are turned off, they don't vote. Or they vote for candidates who speak straight to them, even when they disagree with the stands of those candidates.

Barry Goldwater, for example, was a classic conservative, a founding father of the modern Republican right wing. But he wasn't a mealy-mouthed blurball. He often went against the grain of his own followers - on abortion, for example - and received votes from Democrats and independents.

What Democrat these days ever talks straight?

Here in New York, McCall could have talked straighter to the voters. He could have said: Look, we are a state grievously wounded by Sept. 11, but we are going to have to raise taxes. We need to pay our firefighters a living wage, since they will be in the front line - with the police - if and when the terrorists strike again. We have to rebuild downtown Manhattan. We have to make the schools better. That means bringing back the commuter tax. That means raising other revenues through taxes, or through building gambling casinos, or by prudent cutting of services.

If McCall had talked straighter to the people, would he have gotten even fewer votes than the 33% he did? Perhaps. But I doubt it.

I also doubt he could have beaten Gov. Pataki, who matched him in nice-guy style and had all the advantages of an incumbent.

But McCall could have brought some passion and clarity to the contest, and galvanized more of those citizens who wanted to record an anti-Republican vote.

Nowhere man

Like most politicians these days, he seemed afraid to make any mistakes, large or small, and came across as a man with nothing to say.

Nationally, of course, the Democrats are even worse.

Who expects a fresh idea, or a lucid, unrehearsed use of language from the likes of Tom Daschle or Richard Gephardt? They drone through pasty speeches. They tiptoe around Washington like men living in minefields. They refuse to ask truly tough questions of their opponents. They appear to have no clear notion at all of what it means to be a Democrat.

So the parties seem now to have merged into a single Beltway Party, with a bland and timorous centrist wing (the Democrats) and an ideological right wing (the Republicans).

This would all be vastly entertaining if it weren't for the growing lines of the unemployed, the intensifying isolation of the country from the rest of the world and the possibility of great bloodshed.

On a gray, sour morning in New York yesterday, something bleak and spooky was in the air.