I’m enjoying my first-ever experience as The Dude Hanging Out Candy On His Front Stoop tonight.  In fact, I’m doing it as we speak, because the trick-or-treaters are fairly sporadic so I brought the ol’ Macbook outside with me.

And I just had my first experience with Scruffy Teenagers Hoarding Candy.  These gentlemen did have costumes, though, which is more than I could say for myself for that year or two when I had no business trick-or-treating but did it anyway for the sugar rush.  There were two of them and they took as excessive-but-not-insulting amount of candy from the bowl.  On their way back to the sidewalk one of them eyed the yard signs in front or our house and our neighbors’.

He stopped and turned around.  Then pointed to our Obama sign.  “Is this yours?”

“Yep,” I said.

Then he pointed to the ones in our neighbors’ yard.  (We have a shared stoop so it kind of looks like one yard.)  “And what are those?  Your neighbors?”

“LEON!  Shut up!  Let’s go!” said his friend.

“But they’ve got a McCain sign!” the first guy blurted.

They didn’t, actually, but the Mark Warner for Senate sign has a similar lettering and layout to a lot of McCain signs.  Only so many ways you can do red, white, blue, and authoritative lettering, I guess.

“Read the sign, fool,” said the second guy, “It’s Obama, Warner, Moran.  President, Senate, House.  Come on, let’s go.”

And off they went, leaving me to wonder what Tricks McCain fans might be in for in this neighborhood, or whether it was just the sheer incongruity of the possibility of a McCain sign in northern Alexandria that threw him for a loop.

. . . for me to buy Rock Band?

If they released Rock Band: They Might Be Giants, complete with accordion and glockenspiel.

Man can dream, can’t he?

At this point, Obama is very likely to be our next President.  And I pity him.  He was already going to inherit a hard, thankless job even before our economy imploded.  Now he’s going to take office, like Thomas Carcetti, under a withering financial burden that will likely hobble most if not all of his policy ambitions, at least for the first couple of years.  (And unlike Carcetti, he won’t have a still higher office he can ascend to, for better or worse.)  Even if he proves up to the challenges of the Presidency, he will probably become unpopular as his Administration is saddled with the twin impossibilities of “fixing” the economy and Iraq.  He will almost certainly face a tough reelection campaign in 2012.  (Though, if the Republicans continue to self-destruct, who knows?)

But for all that I’d much rather have him in there than McCain.  This isn’t a time when we can afford to stick the shit job to the other guy and hope for a better hand of cards in four years — if there ever is such a time.

And there remains also that ray of hope — that Obama really will be All That.  A unifying figure.  An inspiration.  Someone who can capture the popular imagination and motivate all of us to work together for a better America.  I won’t be voting for him expecting any of that, but at least he has it in him to be that guy, if enough people decide to let him.  If he wins I’ll be open to it.  Both he and we will need all the help we can get.