have frequently made tongue-in-cheek statements about repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. Now I say it again, but with a straightened-out tongue. The women's vote is making idiots of everybody and we'd be better off without it.

It's hard to pick a defining moment when all roads lead to Waterloo, but mine is probably the minivan commercial. It's been running over and over all summer; interestingly, on a lot of political shows. It opens with a chiding kid asking, "How far would you go to protect your children?" and then features more kids asking more chiding questions. The one that gets to me is "Would you face a charging grizzly bear?" I'd pour honey on the little bastard just to make sure, but then I'm not focus-groupable. The correct answer is an affirmative upward surge of the wriggling yellow line on pollster Frank Luntz's Female Emotion Machine.

This yellow line has replaced the fate line in our national palm, threatening to decide Election 2000 and those in the foreseeable future. It has been serpentining and corkscrewing its jaundiced path across our TV screens ever since the primaries, measuring the instinctive reactions and knee-jerk opinions of the soccer moms and their feminized mates that Luntz assembles for the edification of the candidates.

What the yellow line has writ, let no man put asunder. Not that any man would dare, least of all Frank Luntz, whose cherubic features fairly tremble with uncontainable joy as he explains its progress. See? It's dipping down to Gore's red line! But now look — it climbed suddenly up to Bush's blue line! [Clap hands and turn to camera in triumph.] Do you know what that means?

The slightest movement of the yellow line is enough to make weak men weaker. Did it go up at "community"? Shove that word into every speech as often as possible until the broads think you're going to put the superintendent of schools in charge of the army and navy. Did it take a sudden sharp plunge at "statesmanlike"? Get Dick Cheney a pet caterpillar and make him carry it around in a jar and sing to it at day-care centers. Did it stay steady on course in burrow-like contentment? W.'s incessant repetitions of "education" must be working, so make him pronounce it "ed-ju-kay-shun" to drag it out.

Special attention must be paid to the wavering yellow line that goes up, then down, and then up again. This is the silent visual version of a female voice saying, "I'm not mad, just hurt." It means that she liked what you said, but not the way you said it. The usual culprit here is an edgy distrust of declarative sentences, so train your candidate to insert an adverbial stool softener such as "sort of." Joe Lieberman used this to great soothing effect when he said, "This is a time to sort of knit the country together," about why he looked forward to meeting with Louis Farrakhan. The dropped stitch of "sort of" was so humanizing that the gals didn't even notice that he was talking about knitting with a monster. This statement was a twofer for Soft-Stool Joe because he also remembered that "look forward" is catnip: The yellow line goes straight to it.

It also goes straight to humor, provided it's the gentle, unthreatening kind of humor favored by the "healing power" crowd, who like to think you can laugh your cancer away. Say something with bite, however, and you will lose all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The Yugoslavian election upheaval was a perfect cue for W. to announce that his favorite sandwich is Kostunica on rye, but the yellow line would have deep-sixed. I know because it happened to me on a daytime TV show during a book tour. The hostess was talking about the teeny-tiny stone in her engagement ring, and I said, "It must be a recondite." You just can't say things like this around conventional women. Even though they don't get it, they still know that something was said, and that's all it takes for them to conclude, "You're making fun of me." W. was wise to stick with peanut butter and jelly on white: It's been tested.

The yellow line is woman at war with herself and it was squiggling through our cultural life long before Luntz put it on a screen. One daffodil-bright manifestation of it affected my book-reviewing career. In the early '80s I got my first review assignment from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and before the year was out I had eight papers calling me regularly. What began as a sideline turned into a full-time job that kept me too busy to write another book of my own for four years. I found out why when one of the literary editors explained why he called me. "We'd like to have more women reviewers but a lot of them don't work out because they can't bring themselves to attack a bad book. They pull their punches and bend over backwards to say something nice. But you don't."

The pundits who gather nightly to analyze the wildly fluctuating polls can't afford to be that blunt, but they must be thinking the truth even if they don't dare speak it. If you want to know why Bush is three points ahead of Gore on Tuesday and Gore is three points ahead of Bush on Wednesday, listen:

"I'm not going. They'll be angry with me, but I don't care. I've made up my mind. On the other hand, if I don't go they might think I'm angry with them. Not that I care, but . . . Oh, I might as well go. The only thing is, they'll think I'm worried about what they'd think if I didn't. Why should I care? That settles it — I'm not going. My mind's made up."

The typical woman voter is convinced that she makes up her mind based on "the issues," but in truth her overriding concern is who is most "personable." She should reflect on Mme de Staël's assessment of kindhearted Louis XVI, the last king of France: "When the people feel the need for political reform, the private qualities of the monarch are scarcely sufficient to halt the force of that impulse."

And while she's at it, she should also reflect that history's foremost family man was Czar Nicholas II.