2008 Election Day eve

Tomorrow, the United States will vote for its 44th president. I believe and hope that the winner of that election will be Barack Obama. No matter who wins, this election marks a new era for the American people. We finally get to leave behind the 8 years that brought us a botched response to the most horrific terrorist attack I hope I'll ever see in my lifetime, the deaths of thousands of US soldiers, a sham war in Iraq, a disintegrating battle in the hills of Afghanistan, on-line beheadings, American citizens dying in their own homes and hospitals as FEMA utterly failed to rescue New Orleans from a predictable disaster, skyrocketing health care premiums and inadequate coverage rendering insurance nothing more than a mediocre coupon in the face of the crippling cost of care, neighborhood streets lined with foreclosure signs, a collapsing economy that is dragging an entire generation's retirement funds down with it.... Sadly, the list goes on.

I'd like to see a movie where someone goes back to 2000 with the mission of keeping George W. Bush from getting elected.

Tomorrow, from the opening of the polls to the counting of the precinct results, I'm going to be an official poll watcher at a "super-site" in a primarily African-American urban neighborhood in this enormous swing state of ours. They say that the lines will be long, morning, noon and night, and that this is the "perfect storm" for election problems. I'm excited to be on the front lines, watching the first voters stream in, watching people vote for the first time, watching ballots being cast for the first major black presidential candidate, watching those ballots get counted up at the end of the day, and then, hopefully, watching the election of 2008 get called for Barack Obama as the next President of the United States.