The election maps on media websites have told the story: we may be a melting pot, but the melt doesn't extend to our politics. We're a sharply divided country: red center and south flanked by blue northeast and west coasts.

And we don't seem to be able to figure each other out.

It's not just that some of us support McCain and some Obama. Many of us can't understand how anyone could support the other.

This isn't a small issue. The nation's problems are so severe that the next president will have to quickly temper or abandon many of his campaign promises. And paying the bills will require sacrifices from Americans who have forgotten what that word means.

Nobody's going to be happy.

In the midst of that, partisan politics are likely to make things worse, as the losing party, eyes on 2012, tries to capitalize on the president's pain and the public's fears. And they'll get help from the fringes.

Yesterday, I was bombarded by e-mails from an outfit called the Republican Majority Campaign, insisting that Obama was not born in the US. A few days before, the same group had sent an e-mail with the heading "Mr. Obama Would Have Voted For Genocide." A right-wing religious group e-mailed this: "Barack Obama, a Communist, Is No Christian."

A Minnesota Republican Representative said she thinks Obama is anti-American - and she wants newspapers to investigate members of Congress to find out whether they're for America or against it. McCain's brother said that residents of the Washington DC suburbs in Virginia are communists.

Sarah Palin accused the San Francisco Chronicle of hiding a January interview with Obama; to the contrary, the Chronicle had put the interview on its website the day it was taped, and actively promoted it.

I haven't seen complete fabrications coming out of the Obama campaign, but media fact-checkers have cited several examples of misleading statements and ads. And it's more than a little troubling to listen to Obama virtually spit out the words "John McCain."

All of this further divides the country - and elected officials - at a time when we need to pull together. To meet the challenges ahead of us, we will need a strong leader. And we will need to find a way to understand and respect one another.

"Americans," Bob Herbert said in the Times today, "have to decide if they want a country that tolerates this kind of debased, backward behavior. Or if they want a country that aspires to true greatness - a country that stands for more than the mere rhetoric of equality, freedom, opportunity, and justice."

Early indications today were that there would be a huge voter turnout. People were lined up before dawn, waiting for polls to open, this in a country that too often shrugs off that vital responsibility of democracy. The Times showed voters waiting in lines in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky; Hope, Indiana; Harlem; Cleveland; Surfside, Florida - snapshots of the diversity and the hope of the country.

We were talking in our newsroom this afternoon about other historic days we have experienced - the Kennedy assassination, the Columbia space shuttle tragedy, 9/11. News editor Chris Fien recalled the sense of unity that followed 9/11.

We will need that sense of unity to meet the challenges we and the next president face. But then there's that map, red center and south, flanked by blue northeast and west coasts.

One of the tests of the nation in the next year will be whether we can overcome our divisions and get along.