Last night was such a beautiful affirmation of our country. Set in Grant Park, the place where, in 1968, the division and injustice of America was underscored, stood a real African-American who had just been elected the 44th President of the United States. Instead of a battle-zone with the lines of police and young people separated by flying rocks, bottles and tear-gas, there was a single, joyous crowd of over 500,000 people of every age, race and culture – a crowd so diverse that it could only happen in America.
Electing Barack Obama hasn’t changed anything (yet), but it has come to symbolize change and the unchangeable, the future and the past. It was a return to the past promise of an ideal of equality but left incomplete – “an uncashed check written in 1776” as Dr. Martin Luther King put it. It was a return to the past and future of promise as Barack Obama became the first to cash that check for all of us.
Last night was a return to the future because it not only re-affirmed national character, it also reaffirmed our future. The election results from last night were a sea change – a total repudiation of the politics of division and the empty promises of conservatives. We return to a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The true character of the American people, which had been obscured by the politics of fear and division, was rejected. Let me give you one example from my own State of Michigan.
Michigan citizens have suffered for years under a Supreme Court considered the worst in the Country. Elected with the massive monies provided secretly by corporations and funneled through the Chamber of Commerce, four judges, led by Chief Justice Clifford Taylor, repeatedly ruled against individuals in favor of their corporate sponsors; overturning jury verdicts, legal precedents and creating new laws [when Federalist judges do this they call it being a “Strict Constructionist”]. For the first time in Michigan history, a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (The “Sleeping Judge”) has been thrown out of office by the people he had victimized. Like voters in the national election, Michigan voters rejected the politics of fear and division. The new political road is one of unity and hope.
It’s good to be an American this morning.
History is being made all over the Country, by younger Americans, by a new America. Times are changing and like the old Bob Dylan song:
“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land,
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out of the new one, if you can’t lend a hand,
For the times they are a changing.”
FiegerTime - Geoffrey Fieger's Blog 
Not just a good day, but a good week…the McCain and Palin camps are snarling at each other; meanwhile Obama is lookin’ all presidential, overshadowing Bush as a figure of competence, confidence, and hope. I suspect Bush would offer to leave early if the Constitution contained an early acceptance policy.
When that election took place, I was at the polls at a quarter to six in the morning. After I left, there were long lines going down the street. That was just in Brooklyn. I heard some polling stations in Manhattan had lines spanning several blocks.
What a shame Obama didn’t live up to what a lot of us had hoped. Then again, my dad put it best when he said that whoever succeeded Bush basically had a large pile of shit to clean up and it wasn’t going to happen overnight.
Julie