Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Four More Years!


I am relieved.  I am relieved that this interminable election is finally over. I am relieved that Barack Obama has been re-elected as president of the United States.

The task ahead for the president is a daunting one. The partisanship that divides the nation is deep, and if the vitriol flying in the comments section of the various newspapers I read today is any indication, it will continue for the foreseeable future.  My hope (although John Boenher's quotes in the Washington Post today don't give me much comfort) is that the Republicans in the House and the Democrats in the Senate and the president himself will see that what is needed to set the country on the true road to recovery is a return to the ideals of compromise that the United States was founded on.  The compromise that had to be achieved in order to create the Constitution in the first place.

There are serious problems the government needs to address which can only be tackled with the co-operation of both parties.  I hope that over the next four years President Obama makes deals that piss off both the left and the right.  I hope he gets Republicans and Democrats from both extremes to finally realize that progress needs to meet in the middle.  If he can do that, we will see what actually happens when a president is allowed to do his job govern.

The country is recovering.  The recovery is slow, but it is moving. The ballot initiatives that gave the right for LGBT couples to marry in Maryland and Maine and the votes to sustain the Dream Act to allow children of undocumented immigrants to go to school without the threat of deportation, lead me to believe that maybe, just maybe, the country is moving towards a more tolerant society in spite of the rantings of the ideologues. Obama was gracious in victory, and I can only hope that the Republicans can be as equally gracious in defeat