Nancy with the pretty face: Speaker Pelosi and other characters of the moment.

'I'M looking forward to moving forward" sounds just like George W. Bush but it's a safe bet that Election 2006 cured him of this particular locution. His days of looking forward are so manifestly behind him that we can only hope that he doesn't spend the next two years revisiting his days of wine and Four Roses.

The glitzy cable coverage of Election Night made me look backward to a time when spats-wearing clerks on ladders chalked in returns on a giant blackboard set up in the ballroom of one of those grand old hotels with marble floors and gilded acanthus leaves that were said to have something called "character." This year's news studios looked like nightclubs--not just any nightclub, either, but the one designed by Salvador Dali for the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound.

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The graphics achieved chaos of such Biblical proportions that it was hard to tell a pot of message from a mess of pottage. The most puzzling was CNN's gas-tank gauge with a needle set to swing to Empty for behind and Full for ahead; or maybe it was supposed to be a speedometer to measure how fast the vote count was going. Another channel cluttered up the screen with a stack of ascending blocks representing vote percentages that looked like the print-check icon on a fax machine that shows you how much ink is left in your cartridge. Both distractions disappeared sometime during the evening, but they provided a weary reminder of that American specialty: the improvement that only makes things worse, like software upgrades or those redesigned containers that say "Tear Here" but never do.

But the really alarming aspect of the 2006 coverage was the strange new fairness doctrine spreading through the ranks of the talking heads, a speech habit of the sort heretofore associated with obsessive-compulsives who use words as charms to ward off bad luck and curses. Led by Chris Matthews, they have begun to pronounce "Missouri" in two different ways in the same sentence: Missouree and Missouruh. Matthews has been bothered by this for months; once, on Hardball, he began speculating aloud, as though talking to himself, that it was pronounced one way by natives, or maybe Midwesterners in general, and another way by everyone else. Finally, he began to take turns, and other heads followed suit. Some may think it's a problem for Henry Higgins, but I say it's a problem for Sigmund Freud. Our pursuit of equality has done its work; now, everybody is right and nobody is wrong and our speech must reflect the alternate reality we have created. Political correctness is steadily yielding to total babbling incoherence, which is why the redesigned and upgraded American eagle is clutching electroshock cables in one claw and straitjacket ties in the other.

You are probably on your bed of pain right about now, but the election results contain hidden conservative benefits if only we look for them. I am not referring to the civics-class rationalizations, such as the inherent safety of checks and balances, that have already taken on a hollow ring. I'm talking psychological warfare big time.

In a word, give thanks for Nancy Pelosi. Never mind her politics, just look at her and what do you see? A woman of 66 who has had five children yet looks 46, with a beautiful figure and a face as pretty as the proverbial picture. Think of it: not glamorous, not sexy, but pretty. When was the last time you heard a woman called that? Today's idea of a compliment is "hot." You can't have too many anachronisms and the word pretty is the most anachronistic of them all. Now listen to her and what do you hear? A voice that is "soft, gentle, and low--an excellent thing in woman," as King Lear said.

Put it all together and what have we got? A brunette Phyllis Schlafly. And whose bona fides did Schlafly single-handedly reduce to a condition approaching mincemeat? The feminists--especially her counterpart, the ur-feminist Betty Friedan, whose face would stop a clock and whose voice would inspire recruits for the French Foreign Legion. Schlafly's triumph in the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment came about through her command of pristine classical logic and her Ciceronian debating style, but the average citizen doesn't pay much attention to arguments. It was the stark difference between the women themselves that put Schlafly over the top and stopped ERA. Like it or not, star power is everything, and for a woman, that means looks and femininity.

Now history has repeated itself and given us another mismatched set. Nancy Pelosi is conservatism's Great Blue Hope of 2008. The more the American people see and hear her, the more likely it is that they will come to regard our greatest nightmare as a comic strip called Hillary the Horrible. True, it will be a subconscious reaction, but that's the best kind. Tucker Carlson has already had one. A week after the election while interviewing Sen. Barbara Boxer, another pretty, soft-voiced pol reminiscent of Pelosi, he suddenly said: "Why don't you run for president instead of Hillary Clinton? I like you better than her." He tried to pass it off as a lighthearted quip but it was obvious that a part of him really meant it. So be glad that Nancy Pelosi is our first female Speaker of the House. It's the best defense against what we at NATIONAL REVIEW call a b*llbreaker.

Appearance and voice also predominated in what, to me, was the most interesting, as well as the eeriest, election result. Jim Webb's victory had little to do with "macaca" and still less with George Allen's eleventh-hour lit-crit debut as a down-home Lionel Trilling. I think it came about because Webb has emerged as the Lon Chaney of American politics, a man of a thousand faces with an inexplicable ability to be all things to all people without pandering.

He looks like both the good cop and the bad cop. He also looks like a conservative Republican before the term got weighted down with all the subdivisions it now carries--Herbert Hoover's younger brother whose full face is going to jowls that are starting to blouse over a stiff high collar. But he also looks like a labor leader of the Thirties, one of the burly, rolled-sleeve Reuther brothers, or the prototypical Workingman in the post-office murals painted by Federal artists put on the government payroll by the New Deal.

He also bears actual physical resemblances to real people: Lt. Gen. Lewis "Chesty" Puller, USMC; Spencer Tracy as the tough priest in San Francisco; and, of particular significance for a politician, James Cagney, a sure vote-getter in view of the number of men who secretly dream of smashing a grapefruit in Hillary's face.

His voice is less familiar. He has been heard nationally on a couple of Sunday talk shows, but these shows, like political ads and televised debates, tamp down even full-throated types, and Webb is laconic. It is only when you hear him speak in person that you begin to realize something: He has a church organ of a voice, a bass-baritone so resonant that it could rattle a chandelier. I grew up listening to what was reverently called "That Voice," but Webb's has none of the aristocratic paternalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rather, it was made for leather-lunged clarion calls. If he ever lets it loose, we could wake up one morning to find that we have another William Jennings Bryan.

Last, a progress report: I have always said that NATIONAL REVIEW readers are the creme de la creme, and once again I have been proved right. In my previous piece I told you about my efforts to find out where I had heard the word "macaca" before. I just got a letter from a reader who quoted the following passage from one of his favorite novels.

"No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us in Sta. Marta."

It's from Chapter Eight of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad.

Florence King's NATIONAL REVIEW columns are collected in STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002. She can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404.