With the nation on the verge of electing Barack Obama to the presidency, I decided to spend the evening surveying the political mood in Juneau, the city to which Sarah Palin would soon be returning as a defeated vice presidential candidate. Palin has never been especially popular here. She’s barely disguised her well-known preference for moving the state capital from Juneau to the Anchorage area, a departure that would devastate an already-struggling regional economy. Indeed, one of the interesting details to emerge from the “Troopergate” investigation was the revelation that Todd Palin had, on his wife’s behalf, urged at least one state legislator to revisit the idea of a capital relocation. Apparently, these are the sorts of things that mavericks do from time to time.

Palin’s reputation has not been enhanced by the 10 weeks she’s spent in the national spotlight. Though she remains quite popular as a governor, her bizarre stint as national ringmistress for the low-information base of the Republican Party has not served her well in certain quarters of the state. Still, I was curious to see how my fellow townsfolk would greet the end of Palin’s inarticulate and costly run for national office.

Time: 4:15 p.m.
Location: Downtown Juneau

Most polls on the East Coast closed about an hour ago. I probably haven’t felt this jittery and weird since October 2004, when the Boston Red Sox teetered on the brink of winning their first World Series since Woodrow Wilson was president. I spent that evening drinking beer at my favorite local restaurant, which is quite literally an old, converted floatplane hangar. For the sake of good luck, I thought I should begin the evening on familiar turf.

The bar is sparsely populated when I arrive. Two televisions are tuned to CNN at extremely low volume, while a third carries a muted Fox News. I take a seat at a small table next to a couple of women who are drinking wine and obsessing over an electoral scorecard. NPR has just called Pennsylvania for Obama, but no one else has followed suit.

Since my wife and I haven’t had cable since 2006, I’m more or less unfamiliar with the latest contours of cable news campaign coverage. As a consequence, I had no idea that Bill Bennett and Paul Begala were still relevant in some way to the national political dialogue. Who knew? But there they are, hanging out with Wolf Blitzer and two other people I’ve never seen before. Bennett appears to be a few warm cheese curds away from a massive coronary event, and I make a quick note to add his name to my 2009 Dead Pool list.

Suddenly, Blitzer begins chatting with a hologram. Freaked out, I turn to my neighbors and strike up a conversation.

Both are avid Democrats, and both are grateful to Sarah Palin for pushing several Republican friends and relatives into the ranks of Obama voters. One of them tells me about her father, an 82-year-old Republican from Norfolk, Va., who cast what may have been the first Democratic vote of his entire life. As Fox News calls Pennsylvania for Obama, she tells me that her father’s switch had much to do with the presence of our governor on the national ticket. Though he spent his career in the Navy, she tells me, he was never enthusiastic about John McCain. And Palin, so far as he was concerned, was a terrifying choice for a running mate.

“My father has a lot of respect for Colin Powell,” she explains, “and that endorsement pretty much nailed it for him.” Her sister, she adds ruefully, doesn’t share her father’s disappointment with the GOP.

“It’ll be a few weeks before we talk.”

Conversation segues to the question of impeaching Palin — hope swims upstream tonight — and then to a prolonged debate about whether our governor is smarter than George W. Bush. Before we can sift through all the evidence, Fox News — officially drawing a curtain on the era of Joe the Plumber — projects an Ohio win for Obama. A light volley of applause fills the room. A guy at the bar announces that he’s going to call his Republican friend in Cincinnati. A few minutes later, he’s gleefully shouting into his cell phone.

“Say it!” he laughs. “Say it with me! Say it! ‘PRESIDENT BARACK — ‘ Say it, you fucker! PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! COME ON, SAY IT!”

It takes several minutes, but his friend apparently complies. A one-man rapture ensues.

Time: 6:45
Location: Mendenhall Valley

Before long, I find myself at Henry’s, a bar located in the more conservative section of the Juneau borough, about 10 miles north of downtown. I’m trying to find some devoted Republicans, to no apparent avail. The small congregation at Henry’s is significantly less animated than the folks I’d been hanging out with downtown. A few people are sitting around a table, watching the coverage. I can’t tell if they’re dejected or just bored. Blitzer is speaking with another hologram, so I figure it’s the latter.

I overhear a middle-aged man predicting optimistically that if nothing else went well for the Republicans, at least Ted Stevens stood a decent chance of being re-elected. I nose my way into the conversation, offering the unsolicited observation that the latest polls have shown Stevens to be pretty far behind. Another guy at the table dissents.

“Stevens is a winner,” he grunts. “You’ll see. He’s tough.”

Practically on cue, Lisa Murkowski — Alaska’s other U.S. senator — appears on the television, looking stern and explaining that her colleague has been railroaded by a federal court and that his seven convictions will be overturned in due time. She’s pissed. For the previous 48 hours, the airwaves in Alaska have been bombarded with sympathetic campaign advertisements from Stevens and his supporters. At the bottom of it all, they’ve been arguing that Uncle Ted is a state hero whose four decades of service have earned him the right to be the only felon ever elected to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

I ask, “So what if his conviction holds and the Senate boots him?”

“Oh, I think Palin will run for his seat,” a woman at the table suggests. A few heads nod.

Indeed, if Stevens won and then resigned or faced expulsion, a special election would be convened to select his replacement. A lot of Alaskans seem to believe that Palin would leap at the opportunity to assume national office. If she ran, I have no doubts that she’d win. But I happen not to think she’d actually pursue a Senate seat, for the simple reason that Alaskans expect their congressional delegation to do little more than retrieve armloads of pork for the state. Given the image Palin has tried to create for herself as an earmark reformer, she’d be something of an awkward fit for the office. Besides, I tell myself — not realizing what’s actually been happening in voting booths across the state — the entire scenario is moot, since tonight, Stevens is certain to be handed the second most humiliating verdict he’s received in the past two weeks.

Curiously, no one at the table thinks Palin would stand a chance of winning the presidency in 2012.

“I’m not a Republican,” the first woman explains, “but I think she’s an OK governor. I just don’t think she’d be able to run a campaign on her own.” The guy next to her agrees.

“Well, I am a Republican,” he says, “and I think this whole campaign thing has been great for the state. I’m sorry they’re losing, but she really doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s been saying what they tell her to say, and I don’t think she’ll be ready in four years. I dunno. Maybe she’ll get bored being back in Alaska, so she’ll probably run. She likes the attention.”

I turn back to the television. It’s a few minutes after 7:00. The polls in Alaska have closed, and Blitzer is now announcing that Virginia’s electoral votes will go to the Democratic candidate for the first time since 1964. Moments later, in a mass, near-simultaneous recognition of the obvious, every news organization on the entire planet calls the presidential race for Obama. One of the other men at the table whips out a camera, smiles and takes a few pictures of the scene in Chicago’s Grant Park, where a quarter of a million people are feeling their brains scramble inside their heads.

The mood at Henry’s is a little more contemplative.

“Well, it’s over,” someone else sighs. “So much for that.” Within two minutes, the whole table has settled their tab and wandered out into the parking lot.

As I sit there finishing my beer, I ponder the enormity of what’s transpired over the past few minutes. The United States — a nation whose founders could have owned a man like Barack Obama, a nation whose two major parties have at various times nourished themselves on white racist anxiety — just elected an African-American to the presidency, where he will succeed a man who has been almost inarguably the worst two-term presidency in the country’s history. The nation’s economy has been knocked into a cocked hat, and we’re nearly six years into a stupidly conceived war in Iraq. Our government spies on its own citizens and tortures people. And we just elected a black dude to lead us the fuck out of this terrible mess.

It might work, and it might not. But somehow the whole drama of Sarah Palin now seems beyond comprehension, as if it were simply a weird thing that nearly happened forever and a day ago.

And so once again, at least for now, Palin has become Alaska’s problem. Palin and her groundless ideas about science, Palin and her cavernous ignorance about the world, Palin and her peculiar species of the English language, Palin and her creepy husband, Palin and her right-wing fanboys, Palin and the whole goddamned lot of it — it’s over.

America spent several months with Sarah Palin and said, in a loud and resounding voice, “Thanks. But no thanks.”