I have been writing about the 2008 election since December 2006 — two or three columns a week for the New York Post until November 2007, daily posts on National Review Online’s The Corner until November 2007, and here at Contentions almost daily since then. I watched 20 Democratic primary debates and 15 Republican primary debates. I watched as Hillary Clinton’s primary defeat made a book I wrote in 2005 and published in 2006 null and void. I watched YouTubes galore, campaign commercials and campaign parodies, four days of Democratic conventioneering and three days of Republican conventioneering, three presidential debates, two presidential forums, three vice-presidential debates, and appearances on “The View.” I was dazzled by Sarah Palin’s two speeches, dismayed by her Katie Couric performance, and delighted not only by her SNL appearance but by word from my wife Ayala, who works on the show, that she was absolutely lovely and universally liked during her day there. I watched polls go up and polls go down, McCain suspend his campaign and unsuspend it, and Obama never break a sweat. I fielded thousands of emails, comments, phone calls, about it. Anxiety, excitement, overwhelming boredom, conspiracy theories, idiotic fantasies about missing birth certificates and imputations about the paternity of a small child that are nothing less than evil have been my constant companions.
Tonight, whatever happens, it will end. And I am, as I write those words, the happiest man on the face of the earth.
