Getting out to vote.

My wife called me last night at around eight. I was at my desk as usual, working late, as usual.

"I heard the voting lines in California this weekend were six hours long," she fretted. "We better get to the polls early."

We spent a minute or two negotiating logistics and finally agreed to get up at 5:30 and get on line (not online) at 5:45.

The line at a quarter to six on East 82nd Street was halfway down the block. By the time it started moving, it was literally all the way down to First Avenue and uptown to 83rd Street.

I've voted on the Upper East Side since 1982, so a total of nine Presidential elections. This morning's lines were, by large measure, the longest I have ever seen.

With any luck, all of America, not just my little enclave in New York, has finally had enough with the bigotry and vulgarity of Donald Trump. I can only hope people are turning out in droves to chase the pumpkin-hued pussy-grabber back to his gilded aerie on Fifth Avenue.

In my lifetime there have been no shortage of repulsive candidates. We had Nixon, of course, a red-baiting liar who cynically extended the Vietnam war to assure an election victory over Hubert Humphrey.

Then we had Spiro Agnew as Vice President, a man with the ethics of a used car dealer--and a cruel racist one, to boot.

We had Ronald Reagan, a singularly effective empty suit full of empty bromides who almost destroyed our economy with his empty thesis of trickle-down economics. Reagan was the man, lest his hagiographers forget, who proclaimed ketchup a vegetable and told us with a shovel and dirt we could survive the nuclear war with the USSR that he seemed to propel us toward.

The list goes on. 

Dan Quayle. Sarah Palin. The cynical Paul Ryan. And now this latest affront to decency and his well-coiffed Torquemada-like running mate.

Most often, in all the dozens of national, state and city elections I have voted in, I feel like I am left with a choice to vote for the lesser of two evils.

This year, however, one man's evil is so ascendant that the seriously flawed Clinton looks like Mother Teresa crossed with Florence Henderson.

In any event, we voted this morning.

Now we can only pray.