A Watershed Moment in American History

I spent the evening at The Vault, a local nightclub that had been taken over by the county Democratic organization for our election night party, and it was a crazy time. When Obama won Ohio, the math was unavoidable, that it was only a matter of waiting until the polls closed on the west coast and he officially got the electoral votes of California, Oregon and my native Washington to push him over the magic number of 270.

At ten seconds to eight o'clock we started chanting the "10-9-8..." countdown, and MSNBC on the big screen called the election for Obama at exactly two seconds after 8:00. The place went nuts. It was like New Years Eve on Times Square combined with winning the Super Bowl. My ears are still ringing from the jet-plane-decibel level.

We did it, you and I and everyone else who worked such long and hard hours getting out the vote, in every city, town, village and precinct in the country. A deep heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you.

Senator McCain's concession speech was, ironically, the finest speech of his entire campaign. Who knows, had we seen that McCain during the campaign he might have done a lot better. That was the 2000-model McCain at his finest, the McCain that I thought was gone, the McCain that I missed.

As of this morning, the count is 349 Obama and 162 for McCain. I'd call that a landslide. I'd call that a mandate.

But mostly I call it a clear and unequivical repudiation of Anti-American Republican partisanship, greed and corruption. After eight long years of the most evil maladminstration in the history of this country, Americans finally felt that they'd had enough, finally woke up and ignored the fear-mongering attacks from the Right, finally decided to vote their own issues instead of those ginned up by those slimy muckracking talk radio assholes.

This is only the beginning. There's still a lot of work to do to roll back the horrible results of eight years of the BFEE. We all need to give President Obama the blood, toil, tears and sweat and we need to support him 100% in getting our progressive agenda instituted. It won't be easy, since wingnut radio will try to cut him -- and us -- off at the knees at every turn. Fuck 'em. In the words of Der Monkey Fuehrer back in 2000, we've got political capital and we intend to spend it.

And as for me? I'm taking a well-deserved break. As constant reader mrln commented, I've been working way too hard...

See you in a month or so.