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Well said, sir. You echo my feeling almost exactly. I will add this to all the "OhMyGodding" going on here. Change, fundamental change has already come to Washington and to America because WE THE PEOPLE have evolved enough to take a major step away from our tortured history with race and toward something new and different. Now we could have elected a black Republican man or a white woman (Sarah Palin?) from the GOP, and called ourselves evolved, but we went a step further. We chose someone who was not only black, but bi-racial, reflective of our diverse, multi-ethnic society, and who is, quite frankly the smartest guy in just about any room. But wait, there's more. Not only is he brilliant, colossally gifted, and cool under fire, he is also having the discussion and framing the discussion about the issues that liberals and center-left progressives have been craving for most of the last decade if not longer. I mean the issues of climate change, universal access to affordable health care, and economic justice. He's not only talking about them, he's planning to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM beginning with the first day he's sworn into office as President. Did it actually ever occur to anyone on the left that once someone who lived up to our aspirations had the power to do something, that he would do something other than say, approve marijuana for medicinal purposes? Seriously?
Did it never occur to anyone that such a person might give serious thought to how things have been and begin to move back to the center and towards something that works for everyone? My point is, my brothers and sisters, we have knocked it out of the park electing this guy. The problem is that we are also suffering from a right wing hangover. The debate got so extreme in this country that anything that isn't the other extreme looks too "compromising" and "soft". Barack Obama owes a lot philosophically to the brain trust that served President Clinton so ably in the 1990s. I think the most balanced way to look at his nascent administration is that this is the next logical step forward for the ideas that Clinton championed but could not push far enough due to Republican resistance. It makes perfect sense that he would call on some of those people, including Madame Clinton to fill key posts, as well as people from his own political backyard in Chicago. These are the actions of a gifted and shockingly smart man who is refreshingly free of ego and the baggage that trips the Clintons up. Oh, and he's a pretty decent speaker, too. So, superlatives aside, I would submit that progressive governance looks a bit like competence, common sense, and the right judgment about the challenges we face, and a bit less like rigid ideology left or right. Now with all due repect to Mr. Madden and Mr. Greenwald and his thoughtful, cautionary analysis, Y'ALL NEED TO CHILL!
