Has Lethargy Set In?

Or is it battle fatigue?

After what seems like years instead of months, the election is finally a week away. Instead of being excited, I am thinking, "Oh, just let it be over already."

Perhaps there are too many ghosts of the 2000 and 2004 elections, but in a time when I should be excited, I am feeling lethargic, as if it is too much to muster my wits to see the race to the end.

I must confess that I have been slow to gain much enthusiasm for Barack Obama. While I have no doubt that he will make an excellent president, my heart was in Hillary Clinton's campaign. And we are not always ready to jump in again when our heart has been bruised. Perhaps that is contributing to my ennui.

It was easier in 2004 -- although I was a supporter of both Howard Dean and John Edwards, John Kerry was the clear favorite early enough that I was able to regroup, especially when he picked John Edwards as his running mate. And 2000 was even easier, since the vice president had no effective opposition.

So after watching Barack Obama thoroughly vetted by the primary process, I am more irked than anything by the insistence on the part of the Republicans and their shadow supporters to re-vet him. Redundancy annoys me -- perhaps that is also making me lethargic.

Still, I do (finally) have my Obama-Biden bumper sticker on my car, along with my Darcy Burner for Congress sticker and my Momsrising.org cling that proclaims, "Kids don't vote, but Moms do!" And I even managed to post a stinging reply to a stupid commentary about why both Sarah Palin and Al Franken are unprepared for office. (Don't get me started -- the oxymoron in that sentence should be obvious.) And I even wrote a letter to the editor, although it is not being published since other people wrote what I did.

But I have given up on trying to point out the obvious glaring errors in people's statements. And I even no longer let myself get angry that people are stupid enough to think that Obama is a terrorist and a Muslim. I've come to the conclusion that most of those people were already intending on voting for McCain.

And I have decided that if people are naive enough to base their choices on ads instead of the debates, they probably won't listen to the most eloquent, practical explanation known to man.

And all that thinking makes me lethargic.