ELECTION EVE

Posted at 7:41 p.m. ET

I recall the feeling on election eve, 1980, when I was preparing to cast the first vote of my lifetime for a Republican presidential nominee - Ronald Reagan.  For those of us who made the journey to the Reagan Revolution, the vote was not that difficult, or traumatic.  As we said at the time, we had not left the Democratic Party.  The party had left us. 

We vote again tomorrow.  I will vote McCain/Palin.  The times are too important, too threatening, for the nation to be left in the hands of an inexperienced man about whom we know too little.

You'll see a lot of print in the next day or two, and hear the talking heads burn calories with their mouths.  Ignore 98 percent of it.  Transformational election?  Maybe.  Yes, if Obama is elected he'll make racial history.  But words like "transformational" are best left to the judgment of historians twenty or forty years down the line.  There are very few transformational elections. 

Change?  There's always change with a new president.  Often, it's more style than substance.  If it's Obama, we'll see what he really means by "change."  When he confronts his first international crisis, we'll see if that change is creative and positive, or catastrophic.

This campaign will be remembered.  Sadly, it will probably be remembered for the negatives.  It was a campaign remarkably lacking in substance or depth, given the great issues at hand.  It was a campaign truly built for the age of American Idol, not the age of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  It was a campaign in which the attacks of 9/11 were rarely if ever mentioned.  They have been washed away by time, and it may well be that our vigilance as a people has been washed away as well.

The campaign will be remembered for one major thing - the almost complete collapse of the responsibility of the press.  The rights of the press are enshrined in the First Amendment, one of the great constructions and pieces of writing in political history.  Those rights are there because the founders, in their great wisdom, understood that a republic cannot function without an informed electorate.  The press has always been an imperfect servant of that ideal.  In this campaign it has betrayed the very premise of its existence.  It may pay a price for its betrayal.  The nation will almost certainly pay a price.

Urgent Agenda will start our election coverage tomorrow morning, with reports on turnout.  We'll be on until the results are known.  We'll go light on the long articles tomorrow, replacing them with brief reports on what is happening.  Please be with us.  And do vote.  You never know.

November 3, 2008.