Phil Nugent from the Experience here, with an election morning prayer:

There's a scene in Borat where two naked men chase each other through the halls of a posh hotel and into a crowded elevator just as the doors close. Everybody in the tiny space tries to remain calm, and then the doors open and everybody but the naked guys hurriedly file out. The elevator doors shut, the camera examines their embarrassed faces, and then it swings left to reveal a third person in still in there with them, patiently waiting for his floor, pretending that everything's normal. I like to think of the pained deadpan on that guy's face as the face of America on election day. Although we're in what most citizens recognize as a bad place, and most people are howling for change, a disturbing number of big races look like ties--and as Hendrick Hertzberg pointed out in The New Yorker recently, this has nothing to do with any genius of Karl Rove's and everything to do with the Republicans' having used their mastery of pinpointing key pockets of ignorance and intolerance and redistricting key parts of the country into a misshapen nightmare. Natural born demagogues from George Bush to George Allen are criss-crossing the red meat districts howling about taxes and treason. Nobody knows if it'll work again. So we spend today, and almost certainly most of the night to come, crossing our eyes from the effort it takes to keep from screaming.

No intelligent person wanted the country to be where it is now; a lot of cynical people will still fight to the last breath in their body to keep from admitting having made a mistake or losing their power, which in some cases may be all that's keeping them out of prison stripes. The election of 2000 was, it now ought to be clear to the dimmest bulb, one of those moments that the fates of nations hinge on, but at the time, most people I know and virtually all of the media seemed to see it as a chance to show how good they could yawn. George Bush was handed the presidency by a handful of Supreme Court justices who figured that if America seemed to be doing okay under someone they disdained as much as they disdained Bill Clinton, then it had reached a point where it must run itself, so why not do a favor for George Senior's idiot son? And despite a real committed effort by the religious right, which is something that ought to be a sure fire warning sign for anyone with a still-ticking brain cell, Bush wouldn't have gotten close enough to a tie for the Supreme Court to have been a factor if it hadn't been for the work of all those people who decided that it would be fun, and make them feel really "radical" if they pretended to believe that there was no meaningful difference between Al Gore, a person of unquestioned intelligence and seriousness who was said to seem kind of boring, and a spoiled, mingy-minded idiot dauphin. Many of these same people sometimes complained during the nineties that the world had gotten too settled, that compared to the heroic protest struggles we grew up reading about, there were no great battles to be joined and things seemed, like Al Gore, a little bit dull. Things ain't dull now, glory hallelujah. If you'd like some dullness back in your life, try and remember this much: there are no unimportant political choices. And if the Democratic Party, as it's presently constituted, isn't all we might wish it could be, the Republicans drink babies' blood on a pentagram-shaped altar.