Well, it's been a fun ride, people. Just wanted to thank everyone for reading, and for all the insightful and intelligent comments. Some of you wrote nearly as much as I did! Plus, the discussion was remarkably civil -- I didn't need to weed out a single schmuck.

I continue to be amazed at the prospect of a having a smart, respectable president, and an administration that does not feel like an elaborate charade. It has been so long, I'm still getting used to the idea. Here's hoping that Obama avoids the trap of hypercautious triangulation, and instead uses his rhetorical brilliance to push for real progress. Opportunities like these don't come along very often.

McCain's concession speech was indeed gracious, and had he acted more like that throughout the campaign, I think the race would have been closer. Let us hope that as he makes nice again with the media, no one entirely forgets how he pandered to the worst in people. With that in mind, I would just like to say: in your face, you big douchenozzle.

But really, I'm not thinking all that much about McCain right now; I just continue to be amazed by almost otherworldly headlines like "OBAMA SETTING UP TRANSITION TEAM." It's like a small detail I would have drawn in a cartoon fantasizing about the end of the Bush administration. Except it's real. (My smile will turn into a frown, though, if he picks Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary.)

I've been especially heartened by the images of celebrations around the world. To echo Nicholas Kristof's column from today, whatever Obama actually manages to achieve, or not, in terms of policy, the symbolism of his victory is itself a great accomplishment. He probably did more for the cause of democracy in one night than the neocons have tried to do at gunpoint for years.

When I began this blog in its current form, a couple weeks after my coverage of the Democratic National Convention, I half expected it to be an exercise in masochism. McCain and Palin were riding high in the polls following her hard-edged acceptance speech at the RNC. Obama was under constant attack. The course of events seemed all too familiar.

And then something happened. Many things, actually. The first was Tina Fey's Palin impersonation on SNL. I had just asked in a post whether late-night comedians were making fun of Palin in any meaningful way, and sure enough, a commenter linked to the first Fey skit that had run a couple days earlier. All the tension that had been building up over the Palin nomination suddenly found an outlet. Her self-sabotage in the Gibson and Couric interviews only added fuel to the fire. Then came the financial meltdown, Obama's steady debate performances, and McCain's spastic devolution.

More generally, I see a shift in the culture away from the Bush-Cheney zeitgeist. In 2004, I wrote that America had become a "snorting, stomping, hate-filled beast" that I no longer recognized from my childhood. Pseudo-patriotism, extreme militarism, and self-righteous, jaw-jutting, macho posturing ruled the day. At times it felt like the country had literally become a giant Hummer. It seemed like that mindset would never end.

Those attitudes are certainly still around, but they've curdled somewhat. Katrina, Iraq, and the economy have had a humbling effect. Politicians can no longer get away with dividing the country into "real" and "fake" portions. Yet the McCain campaign acted as though it were stuck in 2004. And why wouldn't they? The same people who ran Bush's 2004 campaign were calling the shots.

Not all the news has been good, however. The passage of Proposition 8 in California shows that many of the same voters who helped achieve one civil rights milestone have set back another. Oppression can be depressing that way.

Also frustrating is the possibility that Perriello could lose to Goode by a mere handful of votes. While I was having dinner at a restaurant last night, I overheard a young woman -- almost certainly a UVA undergrad -- remark on the congressional race. She knew nothing about either candidate, so she decided to vote for the one with "the funny name" which, according to her, was Goode. I kid you not.