So Catherine and I made our way to our local polling place after lunch and cast our votes. I've never bothered with early voting before, but it feels good: not quite the same orgy of democracy that I'm used to in November.

Having actually cast my vote, a lot of the back and forth of the daily political cycle feels a bit more muted. Knowing that early voting trends heavily towards Obama right now (a reversal of previous elections) also makes me smile.

I think that the McCain campaign's prediction that this election would not be about issues has panned out. It's been about personality intangibles, and discussion of The Issues was just the stage on which that play unfolded. I don't think that his campaign realized Obama would come out so strongly on top of that competition, though. Later it'll be interesting to look at the historical view of this campaign; both primaries and the general election race have been fascinating.

To a large extent, I see this election as a repudiation of the slice-and-dice the base, demonize-everyone-else strategy that I saw taking deep hold in the 90s. Obama has certainly not run a perfect campaign, and he and his surrogates have done their share of nasty jabbing at McCain. It's impossible for a rational observer, though, to deny that the tone of the campaigns and the message being sold by the two camps were not very, very different.

It encourages me that the vicious national electoral strategy so popular in recent years (jam the base's hot buttons, demonize everyone else) seems to have hit the point of rapidly diminishing returns.