In order to deal with the stress of watching some other sucky candidate do mean things to your sucky candidate, it might help if you looked at it as, say, NFL football. It’s their job to get out there on the field and beat the living shit out of each other - but after four quarters, the game is over, they shake hands and go out for a beer together.

As to the kind of insanely close parsing that’s all too common everywhere in the blogosphere right now, try to remember something: Those aren’t things regular voters care about. They’re really not.

To carry the NFL metaphor a bit further: Bloggers are far too often like those obsessive sports fans who yes, really are utterly convinced that if only they were hired to coach the Philadelphia Eagles, they’d go all the way.

But honestly, we’re playing in a fantasy league. We’ve had some minor effect on the discussion and we have some occasional influence, but it’s downright delusional to think our armchair/keyboard judgments will always trump experience. They won’t. Just because we were right about the war doesn’t make us right about everything else.

Campaigns are funny organisms, and working in one last year has radically altered my perspective. I will never look at politics the same way again.

You think Hillary Clinton’s an egomaniac? You’re probably right. You think Barack Obama suffers from megalomania? You’re probably right, too. After all, you have to be a certain kind of crazy to run for President of the United States. Any rational person would say, “Who, me? No thanks!”

In a way, I admire these people just for being in the game. Because it’s not easy.

One of the things I realized during the campaign is that people are entitled to the representation they want. (Pretty arrogant, that it took me so long.) For the very first time, it occurred to me most voters are comfortable with the gallery of assorted scoundrels and rogues that make progressives like us roll their eyes. You see this dynamic played out a lot in West Philadelphia’s 47th Ward, where I used to live.

It’s a diverse mix of hard-core urban poor, working-class blacks and whites, assorted faculty, students and staffers from the nearby University of Pennsylvania, and others. They’re represented on City Council by Jannie Blackwell, someone most of the area’s progressives simply hate. Jannie’s an old-style wheeler-dealer who’s forever being accused of various forms of thuggery. But you know what? She keeps getting the votes. She fights for her core constituency, which is the urban poor.

And I thought about that. That’s what this democracy experiment is all about, isn’t it? If every elected official is a shiny and clean, well-educated and credentialed progressive, will they really remember the people who need them most? Maybe not.

It won’t be on purpose. But if you’ve never been where those people have been, you probably won’t be able to anticipate their problems. Maybe you’ll support a piece of legislation that causes poor people more harm than good, and you’ll never even notice.

Anyway, just some thoughts while I’m home sick.