Four days out from Election Day, there's not a lot of drama to the presidential race. The national tracking polls are relatively stable, with maybe a slight drift towards McCain. Only outliers (yesterday, "traditional" Gallup and Zogby, and today, Fox) have the race close to the margin of error. The state polls consistently show Obama with a comfortable electoral vote lead. Among conservative opinion-leaders, the mood is subtly shifting from the desparate search for evidence that McCain's steadily closing the gap, to self-consolation that he's kept the race relatively close despite all his disadvantages.

But as Ezra Klein noted yesterday, there's a feeling of anxiety among many Democratic gabbers and activists right now that something could go terribly wrong next Tuesday. Ezra suggests there's not much evidence to support such fears, and that even if McCain winds up doing exceptionally well among undecided voters, he's probably too far behind to close the deal.

I'd argue that aside from congenital and well-earned Democratic pessimism based on past close elections, there may be two factor underlying this anxiety. The first is obvious enough: race. With the McCain campaign heavily relying on submerged and not-so-submerged racial appeals, old fears about the willingness of white Americans to elect an African-American president have bubbled up.

The second factor is more subtle: personal emotional investment in Obama. Some Democrats have long considered Obama a phenomenal, once-in-a-generation leader who can be "transformational;" others have reached this conclusion more recently. Still others simply think it's imperative, in an unprecedented way, that the GOP lock on the White House is terminated this year, for reasons ranging from Supreme Court appointments to foreign policy.

That hasn't always been the case. I can say from personal experience that I've only had a strong emotional, as opposed to professional or ideological, investment in the outcome of two presidential elections: 1992 and 2004. And those two Election Nights represented the ultimate highs and lows.

In 1992, I had the ineffable joy of sitting in Atlanta's premier political watering hole, Manuel's Tavern, surrounded by members of a class I was teaching, as Georgia was called for Bill Clinton about two minutes after the polls closed. In 2004, the bad news came to me in the form of a wee-hours conversation with a friend of mine who was working for John Kerry in Florida, and told me: "We're done in Florida, and we're done nationally," finally dashing the illusions born of faulty exit polls.

Other Democrats have had similar experiences, more negative than positive, usually. Many were more wrenched by the endless and ultimately maddening drama of 2000 than with the near-miss of 2004. But virtually all of us seem transfixed by this year's election, and what it might portend. That can produce anxiety, which will only be relieved when all the votes are in, and we--that's how most of us feel about it--have prevailed.