The election is finally over. As an expatriate Ohioan, I was so happy to see the Buckeye state push our man Obama over the top. I'm thrilled that the country has entered an exciting new era in our history. Mostly, I'm just glad the damn campaign is over. Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, they did. Right up until Election Day, that is.

Make no mistake, I am optimistic about the prospect of an Obama presidency. He seems like a decent and intelligent man, and I trust him to put competent people around him in the Oval Office just as he has throughout his campaign. I think it is wonderful that the country seems to have rallied around him and his ideas to move America forward. Even though I anticipate him being more conservative than I would like and disagreeing with many of the particulars of how he runs the country, I also can see that he has already changed the tone of our politics and expect that the totality of his Presidency will amount to more than the sum of his individual decisions--much as I felt about Bill Clinton.

But as important as it is that the people embraced change and the idea of progress, I think it is just as significant to look at the election results in terms of what was repudiated. After eight years of being intimidated through fear and dark insinuations, voters said enough. They rejected aspersions against Obama's character both implicit and explicit. They refused to be intimidated by the same bogus rhetoric about 'security' and supposed Democratic weakness. We heard this nonsense--we heard it with the 'bailout' too, though it got rammed through anyway--and we said no. Not this time, not again.

John McCain's unusual choice of a running mate has been the subject of much controversy, and I personally look forward to Sarah Palin fading from the public view for as long as possible. As that is happening, though, I think it's worth looking one last time at the GOP ticket. In many ways, the McCain/Palin ticket represented the yin and the yang of the Republican party. On the one hand, you have the old line Republicans--traditional conservatives, interested in a strong defense and in things like lower taxes for the wealthy and less concerned about what people do on their own time. On the other, you have the religious fundamentalists who apparently live from day to day in disgust and horror that there are people in this country who don't believe as they do, who live and love and learn in a manner that they don't understand and won't tolerate.

The former is pretty much John McCain, a guy who I still believe tries to do what's right. Doesn't always succeed at it--really failed miserably at times during the campaign--but that does seem to be his intention, and even when the people around him were at their mud-slinging worst there seemed to be a line into the deep muck that he would not cross; if he was willing to let his surrogates spread innuendo about his opponent, when ignorant supporters repeated slurs to his face, he would not let that stand. That's something, in the end. He will be stained always by the dishonorable campaign he allowed to be waged in his name, but he still kept a small measure of his dignity despite it all.

Sarah Palin, the embodiment of the latter strain of contemporary Republicanism, fared even less well. Her two months in the spotlight were a tawdry and graceless spectacle, revealing herself as a petty dictator and shameless grifter. Her sense of propriety, her level of honesty and her ability to be fair minded were proven on the trail to be commensurate with her command of spoken English and her knowledge of world affairs. But she, too, was repudiated, as was the cynical notion that someone so callow could be foisted upon the electorate. Vice President is not a fad, a running mate is not a gimmick. Not a heartbeat away from the President.

I don't know what the next four (or 8--12--16) years of Obama and Biden will bring. I'm pretty sure it won't be Utopia. Hell, I don't want Utopia anyway. I just want an America like we had ten years ago, maybe a little better, but something like that is fine. And I think we're getting it. George Bush will be gone in two months, and already people and things like Karl Rove and Fox News no longer seem so damned relevant, to borrow a phrase from Gil Scott-Herron. We still have a long way to go--the passage of anti-gay rights measures here in California and elsewhere underscored that--but the election of a black man as President and the overwhelming rejection of the GOP are big first steps.