As we were saying, it’s been a hell of a primary season but now it’s time to get serious.

John McCain’s teeth are, apparently, too yellow; “gross,” gripes Kos (get that guy a chair at the cable pundits’ table). On the other hand, if Barack Obama’s teeth are at all yellow (ex-smoker and all), it perhaps signals Hope (or at least, something more nostalgia-tinged than nicotine-tinged). In yesterday’s New York Times Alessandra Stanley argued that the primaries deserve Emmy recognition and likened Obama to the TV show Mad Men because he is “an entirely new and different political persona whose cool and easy elegance (and former cigarette habit) referenced an earlier postwar era of American confidence and optimism.”

Then again, Stanley also singled out MSNBC as having done “the best” this primary season among “old-fangled cable news channels [which] allowed viewers to take their time and dwell” on key issues like “Bill Clinton’s mini-meltdowns.” How did MSNBC do “the best?” Per Stanley:”Not necessarily by providing better coverage but by providing more of it, relentlessly.”