Pundits and politicians of the right will mount an emotional, flag-waving campaign to confer "legitimacy" on a candidate who lost the popular vote. And they will pretend to believe that our traditions demand allegiance to the president-elect, regardless of how he wangled the job.

To anyone who suffers from the amnesia that afflicts American politics, such syrupy appeals may sound attractive. But those who remember how leading Republicans have conducted themselves over the past eight years (let alone the past four weeks) are unlikely to be quite so susceptible to those star-spangled clichés. Bill Clinton won two presidential elections without dispute, piling up large voter pluralities and electoral landslides. Yet his mandate was disdained virtually from the day he took office by Republicans and conservatives who saw his election as a fluke and viewed him as a usurper.

That disregard for democratic authority culminated in impeachment only after ugly, ubiquitous and unrelenting efforts at every other level to ruin Clinton's presidency. If any reminder of that crusade -- and its connection with the nasty battle in Florida -- were necessary at this late date, the personification of the long drive to undermine the president appeared before the Supreme Court last Friday to argue on behalf of Bush. His name, of course, is Theodore B. Olson.

In recent press accounts Olson has often been portrayed as a superb appellate attorney of Republican persuasion and conservative inclination, an advocate against affirmative action and a defense lawyer for former President Reagan. Accurate but ludicrously incomplete, that description omits his fervent activism against the Clinton administration. Wherever Republicans gathered to scheme against the president, Olson was almost certain to be present. And if he wasn't there, his wife Barbara Olson usually was -- toiling as a congressional aide in both the Travelgate and campaign finance investigations, and then as a television pundit during the Lewinsky investigation.

As the New Yorker magazine put it, "If you believe that there is such a thing as a right-wing conspiracy to get the President, then Ted and Barbara Olson's Great Falls, Virginia, home could be its cocktail headquaters."

Indeed, Olson went considerably beyond ordinary lawyering and lobbying in his anti-Clinton activism. Less than a year after Clinton's inauguration, the movement to depose him started to take shape in the downtown Washington law offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the influential GOP-leaning firm where Olson is among the most important partners.

Politics 2000: Unflinching daily political news, analysis and commentary.