I feel like one of the laziest tricks in argument is the post hoc misrepresentation of one’s expectations. People often lie, particularly to themselves, when hindsight takes over.

So as a form of insurance, I’m going to write down some ways that President Obama could fail to meet my expectations. Then, a couple of years from now, I’ll be able to look back and see for myself whether the Obama Presidency is what I thought it would be.

Back in June, I linked to an article about good and bad process. It was one of those things that in a small way changed how I think about most everything. The basic argument is that process is under your control, outcome is not. Even the best process in the world can be outdone by bad luck or unforeseen events. The key to evaluating performance is to measure the effectiveness of a process, aside from the results that are ultimately achieved.

For example, had the Obama campaign failed, I still would have argued that their process was good, even if the outcome had not been the one I’d hoped for. In this case, the outcome vindicated the process, but the process was good regardless.

It’s in that spirit that I make this list:

1. President Obama could decline to put an end to the regime of torture, extraordinary rendition, and imprisonment without charges that has defined the Bush administration for me. The President has almost complete discretion on these issues, and I expect a complete reversal of the Bush administration’s position on them.
2. President Obama could extend the “imperial Presidency.” The Bush administration argued at every turn that the President is not accountable to Congress or to anyone else. Any new President will be tempted to maintain the power that he inherits. President Obama should give some of it back.
3. He could govern narrowly. I expect President Obama to promote legislation that will be tough for Republicans to vote against. I don’t expect him to put through a lot of legislation that passes on party line votes.
4. He could opt out of the standards he has set for himself with regard to transparency. If there’s one thing that worried me about the Obama campaign, it’s that it was not particularly open. I think that the secrecy of the campaign was a powerful tool, but I hope that the habit doesn’t follow Obama to the White House. He has talked about running a transparent White House. I sincerely hope he follows through. If he practices radical transparency, it will prevent him from making many of the other mistakes that could disappoint me. I’d hate for the Obama Presidency to be one where inexplicable decisions are made, and no explanations are ever offered.

That’s my stake in the ground. I’ll be able to look at it in the years to come and see if Obama lived up to my hopes as they were when he was elected.

I could make an alternate list of what I hope Obama will accomplish, but that would just be silly. He has his priorities and I have mine. I just hope he reacts intelligently to the problems he volunteered to take on, and that he makes progress in keeping the promises he made during his campaign.

Newseum has a collection of today’s newspaper front pages from around the world.

Update: Many wonderful things have been written about this election, but The Onion’s take may be my favorite.

I’ve been obsessed with the election for over a year, and I’m just as obsessed today. Here’s a disorganized guide to election return watching that I’ll be updating throughout the day.

First of all, ignore exit polls and hope that whatever network you’re watching for returns does the same.

Here’s a short list of what to look for tonight, and here’s an election night viewer’s guide from Nate Silver. John Dickerson lets you know what to look for all day today.

My current plan for tonight is to watch the returns on HDnet, but we’ll have to see whether my wife will go along with that. Dan Rather is nutty enough to be fun, and he has a really interesting list of guests. Because HDnet isn’t one of the major news organizations, they don’t have any of the big name, low information pundits and instead have to make do with people who actually know what they’re talking about.

I’ll be flipping over to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s live election show at 10pm.

I won’t be live blogging the returns simply because it takes too much energy. I will most likely be on Twitter, and I may post updates here if I feel so moved, but I expect to be glued to the TV rather than glued to the computer tonight.

If I am looking at the computer, it’ll be to watch the vote totals creep up, most likely on CNN. To get the results straight from the horse’s mouth, here are the sites where official returns are posted from some states I’m interested in. Usually they’re behind CNN, but it never hurts to look when you’re feeling impatient:

• North Carolina
• Georgia
• Virginia
• Florida – This site is already slow, that’s troubling.
• Pennsylvania
• Indiana
• Ohio
• Colorado – I’m suspecting that this is where the results will be posted when they start arriving.
• New Mexico
• Nevada – Nevada has a very fancy site, perhaps to cater to people who are betting on the election.

Update: Google is publishing real-time returns as well. (Turns out this is where the map on Talking Points Memo comes from.)

Update: How many Democratic volunteers are out on the streets? So many that I got sideswiped in traffic by another car, and it happened to be driven by an Obama volunteer. Oddly neither car was damaged and we wound up talking about volunteering for a bit and then went on about our business.

Here’s a collection of Barack Obama endorsements from blogs I read. I’ll be adding to the list through tomorrow. I’m still trying to decide whether to write a full endorsement.

• Andrew Sullivan
• John Scalzi
• Tim O’Reilly
• Linus Torvalds
• Karl Martino

There’s a reason why I’ve been more optimistic than many of my fellow Democrats about Obama’s chances on Tuesday. It’s the first hand observations of the competing ground games provided by fivethirtyeight.com’s On the Road series. Today they posted a wrap-up of sorts.

Here’s what they’ve seen:

In Cortez, CO, we had Republican volunteers pose for action-shot photos. The same in Española, New Mexico. Posed. For some time at the outset, we were willing to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. They convinced us they were really working, and that we had just had unfortunate timing. It wasn’t until the pattern of “just missed it” started to sound like a drumbeat in our ears that we began to grow skeptical. We never “just missed” any of the Obama volunteer work, because it goes on nonstop, every day, in every office, in every corner of America.

I went to the Obama rally in downtown Raleigh on Wednesday, and the number of volunteers working the event was incredible. I was reminded at least two dozen times to early vote (I already had), and I was asked to sign up to volunteer at least half a dozen times (I did). I still don’t think the frenzy of neighbor to neighbor activity that the Obama campaign is fully reflected in the polls. We’ll see if I turn out to be right.

Barack Obama’s campaign paid NBC and CBS a combined total of $1,736,000 for a half our of their airtime last night. Had the campaign purchased the 30 minutes of prime time air time on those networks in 30 second increments for normal ads, they would have paid $13,179,420. Pretty good bargain.

I went to early voting today and cast my vote for Barack Obama for President (along with a whole bunch of other Democrats). I was going to write up a long explanation of why, but if you’ve been reading this site for any time, you know what impresses me about him as a candidate.

If you don’t see what Obama’s supporters see in him, it may be worth reading Cass Susstein’s endorsement.