I’ve been saving all of my best material about the election for a column that was supposed to be written right before Nov. 4, but my math skills have left me in a bad spot. You see, in “your time,” as you read this, it is the future, three to five days after I write this column. It’s too late for anything I say to reverberate enough to make any difference, so my only choice is to perform a pre-postmortem of this “defining” election — a risky choice, since we haven’t yet been defined, but I tend to be pretty confident in my speculation.

Now, time to get back to your time. Election day has come and gone in what will surely be (and has been) an anti-climatic culmination to the plodding two-year procedure by which we drain from our candidates all signs of life. Paying attention to politics is like watching a chess tournament in slow motion, so that by the end you don’t distinguish between the IBM supercomputer and the human challenger. It is very important to know the difference.

The supercomputer is logical, coherent, quick and it doesn’t make mistakes. It is built on a structure, a system of rules and axioms, an organization to inform whatever circuit has the final say in the question: “Should I do this, yes or no?”

A human, on the other hand, is a flailing creature rising far above its original purpose, grasping for knowledge and understanding, and only occasionally hitting upon them. Possessing a life spotted with moments of genius and failure, and ultimately undermined by its inevitable limitations, a human is vain for even trying.

Who’s who in this analogy? I know it seems like a counter-intuitive thing for a young, liberal college student to say, but my candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, is the computer: ruthlessly efficient and unfailingly effective, he has exploited every weakness of the Republican ticket and has won the most impressive victory since the ’80s. (My prediction: 52.5 percent for Obama, 46.8 percent for Sen. John McCain; more than 350 electoral votes for Obama). He is clearly smart, he surrounds himself with smart people, he is willing to engage all sides of any issue and he is not blinded by partisan ideology. Like a computer, he understands that decision-making is a game of percentages, coalitions and calculating compromises, and he has promised that he will bring this potentially game-changing approach to Washington.

Not only that, but Obama has helped the Democratic Party gain a position from which it will rule politics for some time. The largest generation in American history — Generation Y, Millennials, whatever you want to call it — is poised to become the largest base of a political party in American history. If Obama performs well, he could become a figure akin to FDR or JFK in his ability to convince large percentages of an entire generation to vote for Democrats.

Compared to Obama’s digital behemoth of a candidacy, McCain’s candidacy has gone the way of the Oldsmobile, analogue antennas and (sadly, in the future) polar bears. He made some good moves (nobody can say that the choice of Sarah Palin was not creative) and had some missteps (“the fundamentals of our economy are strong”). In the past, his fear-based tactics would have probably worked, but the world has changed and so has the electorate.

In the end, McCain came out looking all too human: fleshy, scarred and vulnerable; prone to error and emotion; out of touch with a world that is pushing the bounds of what it is possible to know. No human can compete in that kind of political environment.