Those struggles between joy and fear should end tonight

The Election Day stakes have never been higher. The investment of today's voters has never been greater. And the wait for tonight's results has never been more torturous.

"I've got butterflies in my stomach all the time now, and am a non-TV-watcher who has become addicted to MSNBC," says Cindy Greenwood, 53, an Arlington Heights mother, public relations consultant and volunteer for Barack Obama. Greenwood, her husband, Mark (a registered Republican) and their daughters Lauren, 26, Joanna, 23, and 18-year-old Melissa are in Wisconsin today trying to bring out the vote for Obama.

Every blip in the poll, every inconsequential issue that worms its way onto Fox News, every Internet rumor ratchets up Greenwood's doubt.

"I've had a pit in my stomach for the last month about all the things that could prevent Barack Obama from being elected," Greenwood e-mails. "I've tried to ease my fears by staying busy - canvassing on the weekends, going to phone banks, keeping up with my Obama campaign mail, etc."

Her husband has been telling her for months "that Obama will win by a landslide," Greenwood says. "After being let down so hard in 2000 and 2004, I just can't allow myself to believe it - I'll believe it when I see it."

I make that same Obama landslide prediction to my wife - who counters by noting how confident I was that the Cubs would be needing Grant Park this fall for a World Series rally. When she gets nervous late at night, she reaches for the credit card to donate money to the Obama campaign.

"Get the card away from her. Get the card. Break her thumbs if you have to," I think. But she feels better when she donates, volunteers with like-minded friends at the Obama headquarters in the city and calls voters in Indiana or Colorado.

There are lots of suburban folks such as Greenwood and my wife, who have been motivated by Obama to become more involved in the political arena than they did on behalf of former Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore.

"My votes in 2000 and 2004 were both anti-Bush votes," Greenwood says. "This is not an anti-McCain vote. This is a pro-Obama vote. Everything I've been doing is because I really believe in this man. This is the first time I've really felt called."

Democrats couldn't beat George W. Bush (except in the popular vote), and Bush's record-low popularity backs up my earlier assertion that he is the worst president ever - or at least in his lifetime. After eight years with a Republican president, the nation is a mess, the GOP ticket consists of a senior citizen warrior who couldn't beat W. either, and a lightweight woman best known from the "Saturday Night Live" skits mocking her. The Democrats have a history-making, exciting, fresh, brilliant candidate who has energized a grass-roots movement like never seen before.

So if not now, when? If not Barack Obama, who?

On the other end of this Election Day angst is Arlene Sawicki, a South Barrington woman who has been a longtime member and founder of groups hoping to outlaw abortion, ban gay marriages, restore Christian morals, protect the flag and defeat Obama.

For months, Sawicki has sent me e-mails quoting various anti-Obama forces explaining how the Democrat is against America, a Muslim extremist, a racist, a socialist, a terrorist sympathizer, plain old "evil" and even was "hatched" by "trash" whose relationship with a black man a half-century ago proves she "was a trashy, white woman - a sloozy, floozy, lowlife, snail-eating woman."

Given all that, Sawicki doesn't have any fears.

"I'm not one of those people because I believe McCain will win by a landslide," Sawicki e-mails. "I sleep very well because I believe that where there is faith, there is no fear. Whatever happens - Jesus is Lord - and He will see us through, even a possible Obama-nation! God help us!"

Besides, "if B.O. wins, he will have to be impeached and thrown out," figures Sawicki, who says she believes Obama was born in Kenya and isn't eligible to be president.

In what people on both sides should be able to agree is a worst-case scenario, there's always Palin/Plumber 2012.

Having invested everything in their candidate in this election, Obama supporters may not have a fallback plan.

"I don't know what I'm going to do if Obama loses," Greenwood says.

It's up to voters today.

"Democracy is no easy form of government," Robert F. Kennedy said in 1966. "Few nations have been able to sustain it. For it requires that we take the chances of freedom; that the liberating play of reason be brought to bear on events filled with passion; that dissent be allowed to make its appeal for acceptance; that men chance error in their search for the truth."

There is no cure for that bundle of nerves you've stored up on behalf of your candidate. But while standing in line to vote, you will, ironically, be removed from all those last-minute political ads and stories.