Frank Rich's "It Still Felt Good the Morning After"

It's Sunday morning, which means another great column by Frank Rich. This one was especially poignant for me because it expressed a sentiment that I had not thought about much since Obama's election: the end of Rovian, divisive politics:

The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

As Obama himself reiterated a thousand times during his campaign, this was an election about hope vs. fear, about finding the best in America again or falling back into the scare tactics of the Bush administration under the guise of patriotism. And after a misstep in 2004, our country showed that it was time to live up to the idea of America once again.