President Obama!

We stayed up way too late last night, but it was worth it to see Barack Obama's victory speech. My personal history of voting for president has been dismal and depressing. When I was 20, I voted for Bill Bradley and had to settle for Al Gore, who, by losing to George Bush, set in motion the horrible events of the last 8 years. In 2004, I voted for Howard Dean and had to settle for John Kerry, who seemed to do everything in his power to make sure W was reelected. Oh, was I sad. To me, both of those elections should have been unlosable for the Democrats. I was sure you had to be the idiot that W is to appeal to the masses and get elected.

Then came Obama. No way, I thought. He'll never beat Hillary. (Yes, I am a feminist, and I could go on for hours about how Hillary is not a better feminist just because she is female. Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, you can't sit on the board of Walmart for 5 years and call yourself a feminist.) So I attempted, once again, to do my duty to elect the person I thought was the best candidate for the Democratic party. And lo and behold, he won Virginia. But then, Virginia is so racist (don't even try to deny this point - if Obama was white there wouldn't have been a chance that he could lose Virginia - just look at the wide margin by which Mark Warner won), I thought he'd never win here, and I wasn't too sure about the rest of the country. But I voted for him, and he won! And it was a freakin' LANDSLIDE!

My 86-year-old stepfather, who lives next door to us and came to vote with us yesterday, had been very unsure throughout this election that Obama could win. Just think that when he was born, African-Americans couldn't even vote (and they were called everything but African-Americans.) As a newspaperman by trade, he has seen and covered almost every major civil rights milestone in the last 60 years. When he called us this morning Todd greeted him with a jolly "Welcome to the new America!" It truly is a glorious day.