Obama to hit the White House Running

The pace of the world especially in the dire straights we are in does not allow for a lot of time to celebrate or for Obama any time to grieve the death of his grandmother. He is busy naming his team and setting his agenda (about as difficult as herding cats). I was overjoyed to see he is going to repeal some of GW's executive orders if not all.

Meanwhile I have been swinging from giddy to stunned that it really happened to going through political blog withdrawal. Seems I am not the only one. All my friends seem to be continuing to read the op ed pages available on the internet. I was reading Sails blog this morning and she cited an editorial by Frank Rich. I found the following paragraphs where he describes the morning after really spot on for me:

Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

And aren't we thrilled that Obama and the voters of this United States (no longer divided into red and blue) did prove us wrong. I admit to a definite negativity about the possibility of democracy winning out in the United States. I thought it very ironic that we were "exporting" democracy while erasing it here in the United States with executive orders that allowed its citizens to be spied upon, vanished to Gitmo, marginalized by labeling us terrorist sympathizers, the list goes on. Or was going on, but it looks like our President-elect plans to change that all the minute he takes office.