Polling places in New York City open at 6:00 am, and when I arrived at mine at 5:45 a.m. at least 600 people were on line, stretching from the school door near East 33rd Street and Third Avenue back to the end of the block on Second Avenue, and then down the avenue to 32nd Street. By the time I left after casting my vote, at 6:45 or so, it had grown light out, and there were at least another 600 people waiting on line.

Here on the East Side (although not the posh part), there were some suited, silk-tied young Republicans (you can always tell by a certain pallor and carriage) who needed to be at work by 8 am in whatever is left of the finance industry and the law firms that service it. One such couple, young marrieds, stood behind me discussing "Governor Palin's" clearance on ethics charges by a panel whose work this couple admitted was probably "an inside job."

There were some young black counterparts, their faces composed in calm and inscrutable ways that I nevertheless understood as determined. My thoughts ran to the long lines that undoubtedly were forming at polling places in parts of North Brooklyn I know well.

On E. 33rd Street I didn't see many of the new, young voters who've been registered. But it was only 6 am, and they are young! I did see legions of lumpy, crusty New Yorkers, preternaturally inelegant, indomitable men and women in weathered golf caps, nondescript parkas, and bifocals for whom every election, no matter how minor, is a quiet rendezvous with destiny.

As our line shuffled forward, newly arriving voters passed us on their way to the rear, around the block behind us. A sparrow of a woman in her '70s hobbled by on a cane. "Are you going to vote?" I leaned out and asked. "Of course," she said, so I motioned her toward the place in front of me. "No, thank you, I'll wait my turn," she smiled, hobbling onward. As I turned back to watch her moving proudly toward the rear, I caught the appreciative smiles of the two young Republicans behind me. For that instant, we shared a civic-republican bond.

New York will go so strongly for Obama that I voted as much to bear moral witness as to accomplish anything politically. But had I and others stayed home to bear witness only in front of television or a computer, the political consequences could have been real. In politics, as in journalism, there is no substitute for going there and for being there.

New Yorkers who vote regularly aren't given to illusions. We know that Obama can't stop this country's immediate prospects from getting more wrenching and grim. On my way to vote I passed four homeless people sleeping individually in doorways -- up from a few years ago, when Commissar Rudolph Giuliani had made sure there were none. There will be more before there are fewer.

What can New York City or any other municipality do about it? I wondered what Times columnist David Brooks, who recently chided ordinary Americans for indulging a "culture of debt," would after reading Charles Duhigg's and Carter Dougherty's front-page Times piece of Saturday about how even New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and school boards across the nation were drawn into insurmountable debt by advisors who turned them into mini-hedge funds.

I wondered what the national-security state-minded, capitalism-touting neoconservatives were thinking as they watched Gordon Brown and the International Monetary Fund going hat in hand to King Abdullah and the People's Republic of China.

Yes, many of us are voting without illusions for a careful Harvard neo-liberal, whom only a truly dire crisis may drive toward serious structural reform, as the crisis of the 1930s drove another careful, indecipherable, Harvard-trained politician.

Yet I voted for Obama with hopeful determination on one count that didn't figure in FDR's first election: This country will never be capable of undertaking structural self-reform until it can untangle the race knot it has tied itself in since 1607.

Obama is taking us a big step in that direction, not only as a political actor but also as a moral witness. "It's not something he's doing," Dartmouth Professor Joseph Bafumi told the New York Times back at the beginning of the campaign season; "it's something he's being." Voting today is a way of being there on that front, too.