Pre-Election Day hopes

By Edward Copeland

Most of these hopes (or wishes) are based on the assumption that Barack Obama's win is really going to happen Tuesday. They are in no particular order.

I hope that Obama's victory is decisive and not close enough to allow the GOP to try to delegitimize his presidency before he's even sworn in.

I hope that the old McCain that surfaces from time to time reappears in his concession speech, displaying the honor and decency I know still dwells somewhere within the man who was the head of one of the most disgusting campaigns I've seen and flip-flopped and abandoned most of his most attractive qualities. On the plus side, his campaign has been the worst-run presidential effort since Dukakis. (My superhope is a fantasy where McCain 2000 breaks out of the cage in which he's been held all year and strangles McCain 2008 with piano wire.)

I hope that whether the Democrats get a 60-seat majority in the Senate or not, they kick Censorin' Joe Lieberman to the curb and out of their caucus. If he switches to the GOP, so be it. The Dems can count more reliably on moderate Republican votes than his anyway and he doesn't deserve any chairmanships.

With the Democrats controlling all three branches, I hope they don't overreach. Our deficit and debt are at records and our problems are too deep to go off the deep end until things abroad and in the economy get smoothed out. If they do, it's the surest way to give the GOP a congressional comeback in 2010 and jeopardize an Obama second term.

I hope that at least one red state that no one has bothered to poll in will go to Obama.

I hope that at least one incumbent GOP senator that everyone assumed safe gets defeated (for me, specifically, I wish that Andrew Rice can somehow kick Jim Inhofe out of the Senate).

I hope voting problems are few and insignificant.