MM&N Commentary Last night, I mailed my absentee ballot. And for the first time, I voted the Democratic straight ticket, from the governor to the supervisor of mines. In past years, I've have at least made a nodding attempt to vote for folks on the basis of their experience and character. But not this year. The first person I voted for was Ronald Reagan, and it was a vote in reaction to arrogance, malaise, and failure in Carter's policies that had grave domestic and international consequences. It's striking how similar in mood the country is today. The pivotal issue of this election is the war in Iraq, a war that had more to do with the implusiveness, vain gloriousness, and credulousness of the president than anything that remotely approached what he called a gathering threat. In hindsight, I think that the tipping point for the administration was the interval between Cindy Sheehan's protest, that at the time seemed silly and quixotic, and the Katrina debacle. Both events tore away the curtain to reveal the president for what he was-- not as a man of courage and vision but as a partisan hack, not as someone who understood how to exercise the levers of government but someone who ran the government into the ground. Tuesday will be a good night for the Democrats. A political tsunami will finally force the president to raise his foolish head from out of the sand, blinking in astonishment. The wheel has turned. Power will now flow to the liberals, paving the way for an eight-year Democratic presidency and possibly as many as four appointments of liberal Supreme Court justices. No matter who the Republicans nominate to run in 2008, the Democrats will prevail by running against George Bush's phantom. The only people who will hate him more than the Democrats will be the Republicans. History suggests that power will eventually corrupt the Democrats. And so the tides of politics will again someday shift back to the Republicans. But for now, the Republicans have proved that they cannot govern. And so it is for that reason that I have in this election voted the straight ticket.