In the weeks before the election I was so repulsed by both campaigns, by the most visible supporters of both candidates, that I considered leaving the top of the ticket blank, or writing someone in, or voting for Bob Barr.

But I didn't. I remembered I felt that way in 2000 and came within about 10 hours of casting a vote for Nader. To my dying day, I would have had to wear the scarlet "N." Instead, I voted for Gore, or rather against Bush.

I've essentially spent my meager political capital for the last 20 years trying to make the Republican Party the kind of faction that would nominate someone like John McCain for president. Rather than, say, George W. Bush, against whom I voted in 2000. Now that it did so, I wouldn't be so fickle as to switch sides on it. If the price of that is I'm black-balled from the New Camelot or the New Jerusalem or whatever it is, so be it.

I knew going into the booth Obama would win my state (Pennsylvania) and win the national vote. But every vote for McCain, even in a lost cause, was a vote for that more moderate, center-looking, reality-based GOP.

The choice between Obama and McCain reminded me in some ways of the dispute between creationists and evolutionary biologists. On the one side is certainty, elegance, meaning, conviction, higher laws. On the other, doubt, oft-changed theories, grubby blundering of chance.

Moderate Republicans always will seem like a weak, flaccid set, the sort of people you cringe to be seen in public with. McCain's one. Yet he was the closest thing to a leader for that wing of the party. Which was my wing, which was the reason I became a Republican in the first place: To bolster that moderate wing of the party against the incursions of the Christian Coalition — this was, at the time I joined, largely a fight over county- and school board-level politics.

It would be a repudiation of what I had fought for to turn my back on that candidate now, however compromised he was.

It wasn't a vote against Obama — I'm actually pleased with his victory and I have high hopes for him and a love how it wraps a lot of people in the American flag who would have considered the touch of it to be Medea's poison till this month.

McCain didn't run a smear campaign, no matter what the Democrats insist. I don't think any GOP candidate would have stood a chance this year. There was just too much evidence that the party has become unfit to rule, lead, or govern. McCain did about as well as anyone could have against Obama. He ran negative (in the value-neutral, electromagnetic sense of "negative"), but he had no choice.

There was nothing else in the cupboard for him. He couldn't run on the Bush record. And he couldn't run against it, since he had gone along with a lot of it (most damningly, on the torture). That left him with the tactic of ignoring the past and focusing on the future: which meant fostering doubts about Obama, and his unsavory friends and lack of a record. Which he did effectively. That's not nasty, but it is, essentially, negative.

I'm glad he fought hard and made Obama actually work to win the presidency. And I'm glad to have been part of that fight. No one can say this was an affirmative action election.

But I'm rueful for what this election did to the Republican party. The Democrats chased out of Congress exactly the kind of moderate Republicans — Shays, Gordon Smith — who could have been creatively bipartisan. In the party, now, the long knives are out for the moderates.

One oddity here is that I cast my presidential vote in 2004 largely on the basis of what I thought was right for Iraq. I suppose I can say I was vindicated by events, but it's been a painful vindication, if it is one. This time, though, I think it was Obama who, through not fault of his own, was the best choice for Iraq.

He's all wrong about the war. But we've succeeded sufficiently there that Iraq has an elected — albeit corrupt, weak, and tribal — government that functions as well as it wants to. That's probably the best we could have hoped for there all along. That government now is playing us masterfully (and no doubt feeling very pleased with itself). A GOP president would be too married to the project to seriously threaten to just up and leave. Obama won't. The Iraqis-in-charge know this. I don't imagine they're entirely happy about this turn of events. I think it puts the U.S. potentially in a stronger position in that negotiation.

Sarah Palin was such a wild card in this race, but I don't think she turned my vote either way. On my old blog I suggested her as a good running mate for McCain back in the summer, and I was stunned when he actually did it — nobody important ever does what I think they should do.

I thought she was a good choice from a practical political perspective — to galvanize the McCain-hating so-con base in the GOP, and to peel off Hillary voters. I could have guessed she'd be raw on foreign policy and such, but not that raw. But I knew she was a quick study, and any scenario that would have elevated her to the White House would have put her into an administration already in place, and she would have been wise enough to use it. I loved her on the stump: she's everything politics should be. But I couldn't forget she actually represents the wing of the party I don't want to see in control of it.

In the end all of that got overwhelmed in the tidal wave of Palin-bile that flowed all over me from my environment. I found myself on her side (though I had to keep my mouth shut in the newsroom where I work for fear of consequences, and never uttered a word in her defense). If people found her too green and unqualified, fine. If they found her too conservative, that's fine, too. But it all snowballed into an attack on Her Kind of Person, on every aspect of her life — all the things my elite friends never do but a lot of real people, including some Democrats, do.

I ended up being an anti-anti- again. It seems to be my most comfortable position. In this case, anti-anti-Palin. But, like I said, it didn't factor into my vote.