“I am so dreading this evening,” my friend Hallie said, rolling her eyes. We were sitting in the adorable new sandwich and smoothie shop on Henry Street splitting an adorable sandwich and sipping adorable smoothies. “My father’s in town and we’re having dinner with him.” “Ah,” I said, nodding sympathetically. We’re well past that early phase of adulthood where “dealing with the ‘rents’ ” was a phenomenon universally acknowledged by grunts and eye rolls, but Hallie is in the midst of planning her wedding, an act that sucks you back into late adolescence faster than you can say “What do you mean we have to invite the Goldenblatts?” “I gather the wedding planning’s reached the saturation point?” I said, bracing myself for the long and winding path of minutiae that would surely accompany the answer. “Oh, no,” she said. “Well, actually, yes. But that’s not why I’m dreading dinner.” I raised my eyebrows and scrunched my lips, the facial equivalent of a question mark. “My dad voted for Bush,” she said, voice thick with annoyance. “And he just saw “Fahrenheit 9/11.” I know he’s gonna want to get into the whole thing and, frankly, I just can’t deal with it. He was insufferable during the 2000 campaign, and – ugh, Florida. He drove me crazy that Thanksgiving.” “Mmmm,” I said, nodding and recalling the period. It was not pretty. Everyone was on edge. But I was torn between remembering how strange and contentious it was and thinking, “Could four years have gone by already?” – a question not about politics but about me getting old.

“Well,” I said, hoping to make her feel better and thinking of that Bill Buckley line, “a lot of dads are Republican.”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “He’s not a Republican. It’s like he’s lost his mind.”

“Oh,” I said, getting it. “It started during the impeachment, didn’t it?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening. “How’d you guess?”

I nodded knowingly. I was familiar with the type. Hallie’s Dad’s was a Grouchy Dad.

A Grouchy Dad is a dad of the pre-Baby Boom generation, who, despite a history of moderate to progressive voting habits, became so fed up with Clinton and his rascally ways that he voted for Bush in 2000.

Much has been made of Nascar Dads, but I’m a Brooklynite and have never met one. Nearly everyone I know, however, knows at least one member of the largely unacknowledged Grouchy Dad segment of the paternal electorate.

They pride themselves on keeping up with issues and formulating their own views. They may be registered with either party, but prefer to think of themselves not as independents, but iconoclastic pragmatists who defy labels. Their favorite contemporary politician is John McCain. Before 2000, their most defining political moment was a 1980 vote for John Anderson.

Grouchy Dads voted for Clinton – at least in 1992 – and were genuinely excited by his optimistic progressivism. They did not stop thinking about tomorrow. But once tomorrow came, the worm began to turn. Grouchy Dads didn’t really care about gays in the military, but they were all steamed up about the “arrogance” of the first lady’s health care task force and its resulting plan.

Monica broke the camel’s back. Grouchy Dads across the land became irate. They were upstanding, successful professional men, men who, like Clinton, had risen to the ranks of the upper-middle class meritocratically, through intelligence and education. They prided themselves on the lives they’d lived, and the president’s tawdry behavior made them indignant. Monica could’ve been one of their daughters!

Their outrage wasn’t moral so much as generational. For Grouchy Dads, who came of age around the time of the Korean War, Clinton now seemed to confirm every negative suspicion they’d always harbored about the hypocritical, touchy-feely, free-loving turned SUV-driving, sushi-eating Baby Boomers.

One consistently amazing thing about George Bush is the way he manages to seem like something he isn’t: a trust funder who acts like a ‘regular guy,’ an Andover-educated Texas cowboy.

But, when it comes to Grouchy Dads, Bush’s genius is the fact that, though technically a Baby Boomer, he certainly never seemed like one. Al Gore may have smooched his wife in public, but he still smacked of Boomerdom. But with the decidedly unsquishy Cheney at his side, Grouchy Dads truly believed that George Bush would restore honor and dignity to the White House – their brand of honor and dignity – the honor and dignity of Jan and Dean and not the Abbey Road Beatles. They weren’t really voting for Bush; they were nostalgically voting for Eisenhower.

But they did more than just pull a lever. They sat at dinner tables with their adult children and argued their case. “How do you know Bush will be any worse for the environment?” one Grouchy Dad’s grown son recalled his father saying. An adult Grouchy Dad daughter remembers her father saying. “He’s right on foreign policy; we shouldn’t commit our troops to nation-building.”

“I so don’t want a reprisal of that stuff,” Hallie was saying as I focused back in.” I just know he’ll be obsessed with Michael Moore and hating Fahrenheit 9/11.

I nodded, sipping my smoothie. “I hear ya.”

Two days later, Hallie called, and I brought up the dinner.

“Well,” she said. “I was right about one thing: My dad hated the movie. But not for the reason I thought he would. Apparently, he now hates Bush and thought Moore took cheap shots that are too easily refutable.”

Hallie may have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Her dad had seen Bush and the Republicans as the fiscally responsible, moderate foreign policy party of responsible dad-dom, and he’d spent some of his hard-earned dad equity making the case for him.

So, like every other Grouchy Dad I know, Hallie’s father is now voting for Kerry.