Burning off the nerves on election night

I've been first too busy and work and then too keyed up (this evening) to blog for a couple of days, so I thought I'd work off a little nervous energy, not exactly with a live blog, but with a few scattered thoughts and notes.

1) I've been afraid to look at the early tea leaves, so when the Obama campaign texted me at about 8 ET to make some last minute calls, I responded and started calling Colorado an hour before the polls closed. The calls were to people who had requested mail-in ballots, to tell them that if they didn't get the ballot on time they could go to their polling place (provided on-screen) and fill out a provisional ballot. I reached a good handful of people, and they were very nice -- at the end, GOTV is almost all supporters, and a couple calmed me down a bit, as they were chatty and more sanguine than I was feeling.  I also learned something interesting from one guy: that if you didn't mail in your provisional ballot on time you could walk it in today, and it would be counted with conventional votes. So I started leaving that info, along w/ polling places, on voicemail -- all of 45 min to a half hour before closing time. Silly, but as good a way to kill the time as, say, this.

2) Earlier in the evening I had been calling PA voters, and that too offered a bit of reassurance as virtually everyone I talked to was a supporter and virtually all had voted already.  That indicates to me that the GOTV winnowing process was working well.

The shaming strategy

For those who say that Obama needs to hit back at McCain more strongly, i.e. start a negative ad blitz to answer McCain's attacks, recall: the same was said in Obama's campaign against Hillary. He left a lot of attack fodder on the table: the Bosnian sniper lie, the RFK assassination cite, the Clinton Library and Foundation funding. While the Clintons went negative at intervals, Obama repeatedly shamed them into restraint. And he won.

The Washington Post reports much Democratic hand-wringing as Obama keeps back the attack dogs. And frankly, it's hard not flash back to summer '04, when Kerry let the Republicans take him apart with the Swiftboat attacks and the flip-flop charges. But three things to keep in mind: 1) Obama is hitting back effectively, with ridicule; 2) the high road worked in the primaries; Obama repeatedly came off as the adult in the Clinton sandbox; and 3) while McCain takes his shallow swipes, Obama is building the biggest GOTV operation in a generation.