If the networks are planning for an Obama blowout, I suppose I need to dump some notes on my PDA about key Senate and House contests so I have something intelligent to say on election night when 7 pm rolls around and the election is effectively over.

By way of explanation: I have been invited to speak at an election night gala being hosted by the U.S. Consulate General in Nuevo Laredo, which will be my first foray into real-time election night commentary (along with being my first foray into Mexico and, for that matter, the developing world). I never figured on being plunged into the deep end with an audience who probably understand about as much about U.S. politics as the average American understands about Mexican politics, but at least that keeps things exciting. And it gets me out of teaching my graduate public policy class that night, so there’s a small bonus there.

Our book orders were due ridiculously early, so I didn’t slip in everything I probably should have added from my “to be read” list, but at least I got in The American Voter Revisited, The End of Inequality, and Partisan Hearts and Minds between my graduate political behavior course and the senior-level course I’m using to shoehorn political behavior, parties, and interest groups into our (radically in need of some overhaul) undergraduate major.

Now I have to make up some fake syllabi for two courses I’m unlikely to ever teach—but since I put in the proposals for our new graduate methods sequence, writing the syllabi for the curriculum committee is my job even though I’ve deferred to a PA person and a sociologist to teach the sequence regularly (which lets me focus on undergrad methods, which the PA person doesn’t want to teach and which I’d rather teach than the graduate sequence).