Well, DAY-UM!!

Get in, ‘ave it and well done, my son!

With all due respect to District Judge Misery-Guts* – before whom I have to try to defend a spurious claim in a few hours – tonight was not a night for sleeping.  (And I really did try.)

A fantastic result: not just because the best candidate won, but because he won clearly.  He won a majority of the popular vote and an overwhelming victory in the electoral college.  He turned Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Florida, Ohio and Virginia from red to blue, with two of the four States outstanding at the time of writing also expected to fall to Obama.

A 52%-47% result shows that America remains divided, but a differential of over four million votes and the gains made by the Democrats in both houses of Congress make this a mandate for change.

The Minister’s Wife and I were in New York in January 2007 when the little-known junior senator from Chicago announced the formation of an “exploratory committee” to determine whether or not he should run for President in 2008.  Change was Obama’s mantra from the off:

The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put our country in a precarious place. Our economy is changing rapidly, and that means profound changes for working people. Many of you have shared with me your stories about skyrocketing health care bills, the pensions you’ve lost and your struggles to pay for college for your kids. Our continued dependence on oil has put our security and our very planet at risk. And we’re still mired in a tragic and costly war that should have never been waged.

But challenging as they are, it’s not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It’s the smallness of our politics. America’s faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.

And that’s what we have to change first.

We have to change our politics, and come together around our common interests and concerns as Americans.

He is already – wisely – trying to dampen down expectations…:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term.

…but he is the one who inflated those expectations in the first place.  He has a lot to live up to.  If he fails, he will disappoint and disillusion a generation of Americans as Tony Blair has done on this side of the Atlantic.

But it’s a genuinely great night and yes, we can.  Let’s just hope we do.

Rupert Murdoch, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh: your boy took one Hell of a beating.  But nothing of late has become John McCain so much as the manner of his defeat.  His concession speech was a genuinely gracious confection:

If he had spoken with such eloquence (oh, look – that word again…) and sincerity throughout the past six months, perhaps he wouldn’t have been left tonight pleading with a bunch of yahoos to stop booing every mention of the names Obama and Biden.

And finally: a special word for Governor Sarah Palin – please switch off the light, shut the door behind you and fuck the fuck right off.

(*Not the judge’s real name but, in my relatively limited experience, an entirely accurate description of that peculiar species that populates the lowest rung of the English judicial ladder.)