I have been thinking back to when I was a kid, and doings at the North Pole were still a going concern every December. Imagine, if you will, that today is a very long night before Christmas. Imagine that you are at home in your jammies, and all the parties are partied and all the nog is nogged. Your parents are nestled all snug in their beds, and you are craning your neck at the ceiling, straining to hear the sound of footsteps on the shingles. Now, imagine that Santa will do one of two things when he arrives: either he will empty a sack in your living room, giving you everything you could have ever thought to ask for, or he will burst through your bedroom door with an explosion of splinters at the hinges, revealing a frothing mouthful of sharklike rows of fangs that will rip you to wet, red confetti as your shrieks and begging fall on cold, heartless ears. Imagine having to sit in your bed all night, knowing that only one of these two things can happen, but not having any way to predict or control which one it will be.

If you can imagine this feeling, you have a sense of how I feel every second for the week before Election Day. And once the day actually arrives… up on the housetop, click click click….

This campaign, and the eight years that preceded it (well, seven) have worked me over like a loan shark in a back alley. The cynics in the Beltway have succeeded in at least one of their goals: I now earnestly believe on a primal level that, if I step into a voting booth and color in the wrong circle, we are all going to die. At the same time. On a date you could mark on a calendar you already have. I am completely electorally paralyzed; I cannot trust myself with this kind of responsibility! Even when I am confident I’m making the right choice, I think, “Of course, everyone I know who’s making the opposite choice is equally confident that my guy is the Angel of Death, and they’re not kidding. What if they’re right? What if I’m right, and my guy loses? What if we actually have entirely bad choices? What if I picked the right guy, but the other side is a bunch of sore losers and keeps him from getting anything done, including stopping that shipping crate full of ricin that breezes through a port in Jersey next spring? I need to go have a lie down.”

My friends, I have many a lie down.

For a long time– and the campaign has gone on a very long time, longer than I have been a father or even a father-to-be– I believed that I would be the winner of this election no matter what happened. No matter what, the old guys and all the geniuses they brought in the door behind them were going back to Texas to hide their Yale diplomas and pretend like they were ranchers who didn’t summer in Kennebunkport for my entire childhood. (Did you really think I would forget a word like “Kennebunkport”? How did you get the rest of the country to forget it?) Among the crop of new guys, there were relatively few who put a tingle in my tailbone. Of course, I did publicly declare that I would take my own life if my only choices were Giuliani and Clinton, but fortunately his haunted house didn’t work and she packed up her carpetbag and went back to whatever volcano her lair is hidden in. When the field began to narrow, I took a look around and thought, “Hey! Could be worse. And I speak from experience now.”

Back then, I was under the impression that John McCain was that guy who ran in 2000. The guy who got smeared by push pollsters, as opposed to the guy in 2008 who hired those same push pollsters. This new guy. . . I feel like this is a guy who decided, “Heroes who take the high ground lose to Yale ranchers,” and started signing away one piece of his soul at a time in order to sit in the big chair. I don’t think there are too many pieces of the old guy left. Maybe I’m reading him wrong. I hope I’m reading him wrong. It would be great , six months or a year from now, if the old guy emerged from the husk of whatever this new guy is and sat down for an interviewer or a ghost writer and spilled every remaining gut with bridge-burning, gasp-inducing candor about what Decision ‘08 reduced him to and how broken the system is. I imagine him saying something like, “My campaign tried to turn inspiring people into a negative! Can you believe that? We sarcastically compared him to the Messiah and Paris Hilton, in that order. What does that have to do with levees, or stop loss, or subprime mortgages? I can’t believe I did that; I was a war hero. My bad, everybody.”

This, of course, assumes he loses tonight. Not nearly enough people I know are even considering the possibility that he won’t. Listen to me, friends: start thinking about Santa’s fangs.

But first, before Obama loses, before you turn over my car and set it on fire tonight, consider with me the remote possibility that there is still a decent, bright guy in there despite it all. The other guy does not want to hurt you; he just has a different idea about how to help you, an idea that half the presidents for a century have had without plunging the nation into the sea. (Never mind this last guy, President Mulligan. No matter what happens, let’s all get busy trying to forget the living shit out of this bozo. That is why the campaign’s gone on for two years, right? Everyone’s been bouncing on the balls of their feet, waiting to move the hell on?) My dad occasionally says, “If two people believe two different things, they can’t both be right.” Don’t be like Dad. Even if every bad thing you ever tried to believe about McCain is true, begin 2009 assuming that he has learned the lessons that come with taking over for the least popular, possibly just least president in history. Assume that it will take him a while to dig us out of this hole. Assume that he wanted the big chair to fix what’s broken, and that he will do the best he can to achieve that before dying of cancer six months in and leaving us in the hands of one of my mom’s friends. That’s when it’s time to buy the canned goods.

Oh! And I guess there’s also a chance Barack Obama might win. Which I think might be good. Of course, a lot of people I know think it would be so good, and are so excited about it, that sometimes it seems almost ludicrous. Whenever I start to talk about him, I imagine my diaries behind glass in a museum where a curator is saying, “And these were found in the ruins. It seems almost darkly funny to read them now; this was before President Obama ripped off his mask and announced the construction of the forced labor camps.” I feel bad for my parents, who don’t think what I just wrote is a joke. It’s okay, Mom. Just read the thing I wrote about McCain up there and replace all the names. You voted for Bush a second time; now’s the time for some more of that optimism.