And to think we owe it all to *these* guys!

I think it is clear that no one is more responsible for the election of Barack Obama than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. By being clearly the Worst President and Worst Vice President Ever, they were able to do a couple of very important things. First, they woke many people up to the moral bankruptcy of the Republican party in its current formulation. As part of that, they exposed the nasty underpinnings of the whole political climate which has existed in this country, which made it OK to label people who publicly said that maybe invading Iraq wasn't such a swell idea terrorists and anti-American. It hasn't been so long since we were warned that we should "watch what we say." I think it made a lot of people wake up and say, hey, what happened to freedom? What is freedom if it is only freedom to shop at Wal-Mart, or to work at one, if you're lucky, when those are the only jobs left. Building on the work of their predecessors (Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton too), pert near destroying the economy through years of undermining the middle class and working people was their pièce de résistance, to use a fancy French expression.

If you had asked me four years ago whether I thought there was a snowball's chance in hell of a black man with an Islamic middle name being elected with margins we haven't seen for a Democrat in decades (much less being elected at all), I would have laughed and laughed at the thought. It just didn't seem very bloody likely, given all that we've seen during the Bush/Cheney regime. But here we are. It's a new day in America. And I think we must give credit where credit is due.

I don't mean to imply that John McCain and Sarah Palin had nothing to do with it; of course they did. But I think the lion's share of our thanks goes to Cheney and Bush. And I mean that in the nicest of ways. I know many of the people who do not like Bush and Cheney feel a lot of anger toward them, and I've been there too. But I think we also owe them some gratitude, because we needed someone to draw back the curtain on what's been going on for years, and they did that. Inadvertently, perhaps. But in their sorry hubris, they brought us to a point where real change, and not just cosmetic change, is possible. Is it inevitable? No. It will take a lot of work and perseverance. We can't just say, "OK, Obama's been elected, we can just relax and go home and wait for him to take care of stuff for us." It won't work that way. We must build that change from the ground up. If we want a more perfect union, and a better world, our work remains before us. This election only makes that change more possible.

Still, I cried tears of joy and relief and amazement over and over again this week. It brought to mind this scene, from Return of the King:

The battle is over, the good guys have won. The darkness has been banished, and the new king has been crowned. It's a similar moment, of joy, and relief, and hope. Yet the world outside is damaged and scarred. The job ahead is daunting. Yet we can enjoy the moment for a little while, and then we get to roll up our sleeves to start rebuilding.