Now that President-elect Barack Obama has claimed his historic victory, we can stop speculating about the outcome of the election and start speculating about everything else. What does it say about where we've come as a nation? How will Mr. Obama govern? What direction will the country take? Can Comedy Central survive without fodder from George Bush, Dick Cheney and the McCain/Palin campaign? Or will Vice President-elect Joe Biden suffice?

Of course we could let the answers unfold in their own time and then discuss what actually happens. But then how would we fill the obsession-vacuum left by the end of a two-year presidential campaign?

So, as a public service to all you political junkies going into post-election withdrawal, I offer this template, a kind of Rorschach test for the future. Mark your answers, put them in a drawer and take them out somewhere down the line to see how prescient and astute you were. Whoever was most consistently wrong wins a pundit job on prime-time cable and a guest spot filling in for Robert Novak.

The race factor

1. Forty-five years after Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, the country elected its first African-American president, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. When historians look back at this moment, what role will they say was played by race?

A) Voters chose Mr. Obama because he's black, to break the presidency's color line and purge the toxic remnants of slavery.

B) They voted for him in spite of his race, because the economic meltdown had them scared half to death and the other guy didn't appear to get it.

C) They were so taken with the power of Mr. Obama's ideas, life story, oratory and demeanor that the color of his skin was a nonissue.

D) The most important color in this race was green. After reneging on his pledge to accept public financing, Mr. Obama went on to break all fund-raising records and wage the most expensive campaign in U.S. history.

E) It just didn't seem right to let Bill Clinton stand as the first black president.

The drubbing

2. How will history explain the McCain/Palin ticket's electoral drubbing, including defeats in GOP strongholds like Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and Colorado?

A) They were out-spent, out-teched and out-maneuvered by the most effective campaign strategy and execution in memory -- one that mostly took the high road and avoided tit-for-tat on the insult-o-meter to boot.

B) After the mess created by eight years of the Bush administration, even Republican voters wanted to send their party packing.

C) Picking a running mate who thinks Africa is a country makes voters doubt your judgment.

D) The war hero and bipartisan patriot who made that elegant concession speech was too rarely in evidence in his own campaign.

E) Americans were so desperate to get Joe the non-plumber off the national stage, even the GOP-manufactured images of a radical left-wing socialist, terror-loving, Muslim-denying, America-hating elitist didn't scare them off.

Uh oh, now what?

3. Will the new president be able to end the divisiveness of our national politics, unite the country, fix what's broken and restore America's image?

A) Yes. He'll focus on common ground, reach across the aisle and get people invested in solutions.

B) Maybe. One reason he won so handily was that he sketched in broad strokes, but the devil is always in the details.

C) Not unless he can do all these things for $1.95, because that's all that's left in the U.S. treasury.

D) No. He's never run anything except the most stunning 50-state campaign in decades, so how can he possibly run a country with 50 states?

Short list I

4. Who's on the short list for ambassadorships?

A) Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg

B) Dan Rooney

C) Oprah

D) Tina Fey

What about Congress?

5. Democrats significantly added to their hold on Congress, which has even lower approval ratings than Mr. Bush. How will they use their increased majority?

A) To rub the Republicans' noses in the dirt as payback for the past eight years.

B) To rub Sen. Joe Lieberman's nose in the dirt as payback for the past two months.

C) To take the advice of conservative wing nuts and move decisively to the right because that's what the voters secretly wanted when they put so many Democrats in office.

D) ) To load up signature bills with so many unrelated, self-serving amendments that the president won't want to sign them.

E) To act, for once, like a unified force, and to advance their new leader's initiatives on pressing national concerns.

Whither Republicans?

6. Once the McCain campaign's circular firing squad runs out of ammo, how will Republicans regroup?

A) By recognizing that Karl Rove's strategy of governance by the right-wing for the right-wing base was a disaster.

B) By tacking ever harder to the right, kicking out all the RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) who were insufficiently hawkish on tax cuts, deregulation and the Iraq war.

C) By returning to core principles of fiscal responsibility and accountability, dropping the anti-intellectual demagoguery and getting the heck out of people's bedrooms.

D) By acknowledging that government is not, by definition, the enemy, that it has a critical role to play in some important areas like, oh, banking oversight.

Short list II

7. Who's on the short list for the Supreme Court?

A) Hillary Clinton

B) Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick

C) Cyril Wecht

D) Anita Hill