Merrill Lynch was the ideological outlier — 86% of its top executives’ campaign donations as of last spring had gone to Republicans. Citigroup’s management group was the most bipartisan: 62% Democratic. And Barack Obama did best, relatively speaking, among the people who ran Lehman Brothers.

But what’s most interesting — bizarre, actually — is that the three most Democratic banks were Democratic to precisely the same degree: 93% of the campaign contributions from the top executives at each of J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley went to Obama, Hillary Clinton, et alia. As if we needed another data point to confirm the astonishingly sheep-like behavior of people on Wall Street.

Which tells us something about his shrewdness, I suppose — if you’re engaged in a massive criminal enterprise, it makes sense to stay out of the spotlight. But just how and why on earth did the Times‘ business staff, for all those decades, neglect to run a longer piece about him and his remarkable firm and his enormous reputation?

But do the math, and this default piece of common sense doesn’t look so convincing. College-educated people are more than a quarter of the population (and an even higher fraction of those who vote), people under 30 are 15%, and African-Americans are 11.5%. In other words, those three groups combined make up half the electorate.

Every time I hear that piece of Clinton campaign spin — that Obama’s lead is small or slim or slight — I wonder: in what arithmetical universe? Of the pledged delegates elected so far, Obama leads 53% to 47%. After the remaining primaries and caucuses, that lead might be reduced to 52%-48%. In no election I know about has a margin of four or six percent ever been considered “slight.”

As one of my daughters said about the news, “Woo-hoo!” (And as another artist said in 1985, “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect…I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”)

But for wafflers and fence-sitters and even more or less committed Clinton voters who happen to be white, here’s another reason: every white vote that Obama gets will be counted by the media (and historians) as a bit of proof that America is measurably and truly moving beyond its most tragic history, and every white vote that Hillary Clinton gets will be counted as a race-based anti-black vote. Unfair and unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. In this instance, perception will be reality.

So: Clinton voters need to understand that if their candidate wins, they will be part of a depressing morning-after metric rather than a hopeful one.

By the way? During the last few weeks the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Christian Science Monitor all put Heyday on their best-books-of-2007 lists; the Monitor calls it one of the 19 best novels of the year.

So: happy new year!

And now, back to work on the next one.

But over the years I’ve thought I noticed a tic in her writing — that is, an extreme fondness for the adjective “hallucinatory.” And when I saw a variation in the first sentence of her review of Denis Johnson’s new Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke (“reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on…whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics”), I decided to search the Times archives and make a tally to see if I was right.

I was. In her thousand-odd pieces in the Times these last 25 years, she has, by my count, used hallucinatory in 63 of them, not counting a couple of references to literal drug experiences. She used to do it even more frequently — seven hallucinatorys in 1985, six in 1990 — often with only a few days separating instances. Since 2002 she has limited herself to no more than three a year.

Before Tree of Smoke, she had, in descriptions of fiction about Vietnam, defaulted to the word eleven times — and in three different earlier pieces had described Johnson’s 1985 novel Fiskadoro as “hallucinatory.” Apart from the Vietnam War, the work of Gabriel García Márquez (and fiction about Latin America generally) is the most reliable trigger: in writing about Márquez she has resorted to “hallucinatory” eight times.