Nice.

Don’t know about you but I’ve got CNN simmering in the background while I work.  I’m not American.  I don’t live in the States.  I am aware that the next twelve hours or so will change their country and the rest of the world with it.

McCain has commanded a fairly old school style political campaign.  This was my big disappointment with Hillary, as well.  She started strong but slid back into the usual cycle of rhetoric and opponent slagging.  I don’t believe she would have made a good president, not compared to Obama, and I’m not sorry she’s gone.  Along with her plan of giving everyone $400 to stave off the recession.  You can see now what a useless gesture that would have been.

What set Obama apart for me, what I think has inspired the country, is that he does not subscribe to that mentality.  He speaks, for the most part, of ground-level, common sense ideas.  It’s a simple message: “The system is broken, and I can fix it.”  That’s not a revolutionary message in and of itself, but the difference is that it does not sound like rhetoric.  I think he knows what the rest of us know, and he’s actually willing to do something about it.  That’s new.  It bugs me a little that he has styled his more flowery oratory after MLK, but I can hardly blame him.  People tend to emulate those who inspire them.

What bugs me most about the GOP campaign is their brittle smugness.  With straight faces they freely bludgeon the truth and act like they’re letting us in on the secret.  In an age where facts can be checked in about the same time it takes to type it into Google, those tactics are just stupid.  If they are counting on voter ignorance then they are stating bluntly that they really believe YOU are stupid.  Are you stupid?

Whether they do the country good or not, THAT is completely unacceptable for me.

This is a big day.  Politically speaking, one of the biggest ever.