This campiagn has gone on too long

...Or maybe not. The thing's been on for two years now, or so they keep telling me, and thank god today it finally wraps up for good. And here I am, awake for no reason whatsoever at 2:30 in the morning with the ABC News overnight broadcast playing on the TV beside me (praise be that I don't have cable; I'd sleep every night to MSNBC if I did, and all my dreams would star Chris Matthews).

Anyway. ABC ran an interesting spot just now, taped partly in March and partly last Thursday, at the bowling alley in Allentown PA where Obama notoriously did a bad job knocking over some oblong sticks with a rolled ball. In March, they had no problem finding a gaggle of disturbing white men to admit that, "Yes, race is a factor" in their opposition to the Obama candidacy. One of them spouted out something about Jeremiah Wright as if he'd stayed up late the previous night memorizing Hannity & Colmes transcripts.

But a funny thing happened in this way-way-too-long campaign. ABC found many of the same guys in the same bowling alley last week, and more than one of them was fumbling to explain why he now has Obama yard signs up in front of his house. "It's the economy." "McCain seems too old." "I'm just not uncomfortable with Obama anymore."

So sure, this campaign has gone on well past the point of human tolerability - but, possibly, just barely long enough to convince America that some black guy named Barack Hussein Obama is probably not the antichrist.

I have a cynical streak, so that's as close to "hopeful" as I can do.

***

Not that my dad doesn't still have his doubts. In talking with him Sunday night he kind of verbally threw up his hands and said, "Well, I guess your guy is going to win." Not that he likes McCain. In fact he doesn't seem to like much of anybody, at least not in the world of politics. "You'd better enjoy this now, because god knows what we're going to get after four years of this guy in the White House."

I suggested that however disappointing an Obama presidency may turn out to be - and with the financial crisis and the cost of the bailout, there's plenty of opportunity for it to be disappointing indeed - it will still probably not involve new unjustified wars, flagrant violation of our treaty obligations in the form of semisecret torture programs, or the ongoing and systematic violation of millions of Americans' fourth-amendment rights by warrantless wiretapping. I think I added something to the effect that these violations meet the definition of treason as far as I'm concerned, and that the upper management of the present administration should by all rights be spending the rest of their lives in prison.

I was on a roll. But my dad threw me for a loop. He said that all may be so, but that when it comes to malfeasance Bush doesn't hold a candle next to Bill Clinton. Whuh-whuh? And so I asked what Clinton did that was so bad, since I assume my dad's sense of this is going to differ from my own (ie, that Clinton's presidency was nothing more than a long rearguard defense spent appeasing Newt Gingrich).

My dad's answer was fascinating. "I don't know what all Clinton did, but that man is one of the the slimiest S.O.B. s I have ever seen." Apparently, Clinton has done many terrible things and has even more terribly managed to keep them all secret.

Hey, who needs facts when you have a theory?

(Too bad Clinton didn't exercise these powers of concealment of his a little better vis a vis that whole Lewinsky thing....)

So what does this have to do with Obama trouncing McCain later on today? Maybe not much. I might have wandered a little. But suffice it to say that in January Obama's going to be taking on the mantle not just of the Presidency, but also of a great deal of random ill will. Gentlemen, start your shout shows.

So good luck, Mr. Obama. And my condolences about your grandmother.