Get your sticker here!
Among the cutest reactions from the other night:
REM, in Sangiago, Chile
A bit from the Times Op-ed pages:
Bob Herbert, from Saturday:
We still have two wars to deal with and an economic crisis as severe as any in decades. But we should take a moment to recognize the stunning significance of this moment in history. It’s worth a smile, a toast, a sigh, a tear.
America should be proud.
And Nicholas Kristof:
Considering that past, perhaps the most incisive comment on Mr. Obama’s election actually came long ago. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the Hawaii Legislature in 1959, two years before Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu, and declared that the civil rights movement aimed not just to free blacks but “to free the soul of America.”
Mr. King ended his Hawaii speech by quoting a prayer from a preacher who had once been a slave, and it’s an apt description of the idea of America today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”
And of course Paul Krugman:
If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.
It's going to start sounding clichéd soon, but for me, Tuesday was a chance to see this country the way I used to see it. I used to believe that the US was a good--no, a great--place, a place where ideas like equality and justice meant something, and where government derived its power from the consent of all the people. As I grew and read more, that belief began to fade into a hope.
I don't want to suggest that that hope has now been fulfilled, or that we've become somehow perfect overnight. Indeed, results in places like California suggest that much still needs to change. Nevertheless, on Tuesday our great country moved a little closer to becoming the country that would so much like to believe in. It is a night I will never forget, and I thank you all for sharing in it with me.
And we weren't the only ones: across the country, 88% of the country tilted toward the Democrats as compared to 2004. The entire state of Montana, for example, voted more for the Dems (even though the state still went for McCain, the margin was significantly narrower than in '04).
What a thing to see!
Video report? Sure:
[Update 08:33 Saturday 8 November]
What's Marisa's favorite celebratory image look like?
From this selection of Yes We Did merchandise
Brilliant.
Have a great weekend, reader!
On a humorous note: I was talking to a lady from North Pole, Alaska, Thursday and started to say how cool that was. She cut me off by saying, "Puh-leez, it's the third most embarrassing thing about living in Alaska after Palin and Stevens!" (She then referred to her home town as a tourist trap and said they have a city ordinance requiring citizens to leave their Christmas decorations up year 'round.)
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