Goodnight, America

11:00 AM East Africa Time, 10:00 PM in CA.  Goodnight, good people of America. You have just made Barack Obama President for 4 more years. Obamacare will have a chance to prove itself, and we have shown at least state-wide support for such progressive ideas as recreational pot and gay marriage, not to mention gay Senators.  Some of my friends and family are ready to pack up and move to a different country, (at least one of them is looking on from afar already, shaking her head.)  It was a very close election, and it may be that ultimately we will have a reverse of 2000, when Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.  In the meantime, we still have heavy decisions to make:  how to prosper our middle class to generate the spirit and capital we need to set our country to rights. Rebuild our bridges and schools. Re-up our opportunities.   We can’t do it with ever higher taxes, but we also can’t do it by ‘starving’ government, and making it the enemy.  That government is inherently bad, (the chestnut upon which Reagan rode into history), that one single idea is, I think, the undoing of the Republican Party in this election.  Because everyone with the energy and wit to register and vote sees the hypocrisy of this position.  How can you say that you want smaller government when you can’t say how you will make it smaller?  Americans don’t want taxes, but we want our social safety net too, and our interstate highways, and our FEMA.  And, how can we say we want smaller government and then campaign for more order and control, as in, of crimes, and of women’s lives, and of making women criminals?   The line was just too narrow for a limited politician like Romney to tread, he who was hamstrung by his history as a moderate, his wealthy lifestyle and his unknowable religion.  (Secret rites, secret rules, and, maybe, secret agendas – I don’t believe that, really, but it was there, in the ether as they used to say, like the color of Obama’s skin).  If there is one outcome I hope for this election, it’s that the Republican party sees that it cannot just hope for another Reagan, the perfect man with the perfect resume’, to get exactly what they want and show us all how wrong headed we have been.  It’s time they came to the table and participated.   The obstructionism of the last 4 years is now what's damaging the country.  It’s obvious that the American people, at least a legal majority, don’t want them to lead.  If they don’t want to follow, they must get out of the way, or change.