A Win For The People. A Loss For California.

Today I am proud of my fellow Americans for their bravery, common sense, and willingness to look beyond the sleaze to elect the clearly more suitable candidate for president.

Barack Obama, the hopes and prayers of the Gun-Toting Liberal are with you!

In one day of record-breaking civic activity, the people of the U.S. have shown the world that the marvel and miracle of the American experiment survives. People are dancing in all corners of the globe (despite the fact that globes do not have corners). An era is over, finally. America is coming back to us, they are saying, backing away from the precipice of totalitarian, of military unilateralism. Becoming again a beacon of hope and possibility.

The era of paranoia, fear and psychological projection, born of right-wing demagoguery, whipped beyond the boiling point by the Al Qaeda attacks of nine eleven, and stoked by endless war, seems to be ending.

Today it feels like a whole new country. And there is a lot to be grateful for.

I am grateful that John McCain is going to do what old soldiers do, and just fade away. I am happy not to have to watch the spectacle of Cindy McCain, steeped in a benzodiazepene fog, clicking her talons against her bronzed and burnished exoskeleton while silently choking back her rage at her angry pipsqueak husband. The Obamas are far easier as a family to look at.

I am grateful that the taxpayers saw fit to give Sarah Palin a one-way ticket back home to Wasilla, where she can surround herself with the "real Americans" she finds so superior to the rest of us. Governor, you can go back to brawling with the other pit bulls down at that fancy hockey rink we bought you with taxpayer money!

Governor Palin can now re-focus her attention on finding a replacement for Senator Ted Stevens, a "real American" who is in "real bad trouble" and may be wearing some "real handcuffs" and sitting in a "real prison cell" soon.

But most of all I am grateful to the people for their return to sanity, to that uniquely American generosity of spirit, away from division and intolerance, toward calm and pragmatic politics. Obama has the power to inspire, and I have been swept up in his lofty rhetoric consistently. But more than that, I trust Obama to think with his head, feel with his heart, listen with his ears, and see with his eyes. I believe Obama is sincere about seeing what is real, living in reality, and fixing real problems in real time. Gone are the days when emissaries from the "reality-based community" were banished from the Oval Office.

Like so many of you, I am overcome with emotion when I think of the African-American journey through history, the justice and promise of our nation denied for so long which is revived today. Whatever happens from now forward, the consciousness of our country is changed forever. A black man has been elected president of the United States!

Sadly, there is a setback for civil rights, and that is the passage of Proposition 8 ending gay marriage in California. Those who can't see the common struggle for equality of all marginalized people will soon have to come to grips with the fact of gay rights are coming, like it or not.

More on this sad coda to a great day in the future. For now, it's time to relax, celebrate, breathe easy, and let the roiling waters calm.