Rare Opportunity

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post columnist and regular commentator on MSNBC, who seems to be a really great guy, writes on this Thanksgiving Day with a sense of hope:

As we celebrate Thanksgiving and enter the holiday season, it feels as if our nation is at a cusp, a brink, a verge. It's true that if things get much more "interesting," we might have a collective nervous breakdown. But along with the anxiety, there's also a sense of rare opportunity -- a chance to emerge better than we were economically, politically and socially.

....we've all learned that dealmaking for dealmaking's sake -- for decades, the most highly compensated business activity in America -- does not in fact create enduring wealth. There are straight-A seniors at Harvard and Princeton who planned to go into investment banking before the whole industry imploded. Now, maybe some of these brainiacs will go to work for the auto industry and save Detroit. Maybe some will invent, manufacture and market world-changing "green technology." Maybe some will join the Peace Corps. Maybe some will become teachers.

Politically, Americans are less divided than we've been since at least the Reagan era, perhaps longer. I know that many people would dispute that assertion, but I'll defend it. Barack Obama's victory margin, 53 to 46 percent, didn't qualify as a popular-vote landslide. But considered with other factors -- Obama's electoral vote haul, which was a landslide; the Democratic Party's gains in both houses of Congress -- the outcome was a clear mandate.

The only point I might disagree with him on is the 'landslide' comment. I think that given the circumstances, this was a landslide election, the most decisive since 1992, which these days, seems like an eternity.

But I also must add his final two paragraphs, which are so true.

A conservative opinion-maker told me recently that she really, truly, with all her heart wanted John McCain to win -- and then, when Obama and his family appeared on election night, "it all just went away." It wasn't that she forswore her candidate or her conservative philosophy -- soon she'll be writing elegant eviscerations of the new president's policies. But she understood the epochal significance of the election of the first African American president, and she was deeply moved.

In myriad ways that we'll discover over the next four years, Obama's election makes this a different country -- "a more perfect union." I, for one, feel blessed to live in such interesting times.