And though I polled just slightly lower than Ron Paul in the election, I share the happiness most in America feel this morning. It’s finally time to wrest control from the most divisive and ill-equipped president, in the last 100+ years, and begin to steer this ship out of the muck and the mess the current administration has parked us.

Obama ran a very modern campaign.  He embraced the technology of today — social networking apps like my.barackobama and twitter — to run a truly grassroots campaign. And it showed among educated voters, new voters, and minorities. He was able to do what no democrat since Jimmy Carter was able to do — Build a coalition of voters across the various regions of this country to achieve a popular majority(52% vs. 46%).

Can we gauge anything from this?  I think so.  The primary knock on Obama is his experience.  But ask yourself, in a room full of people seated and listening to a speaker, who is the smartest in the room?  The speaker? or the room full of people?  Take note of this passage from his speech at Grant park:

For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor’s bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there. 

We. As a people.

We’ve heard that before haven’t we?  First, for as the framers of our constitution knew, no one man can do this alone.  And isn’t that what we neglected until we were reminded by the capabilities of the Web — the best ideas are crowdsourced. Groundswelled. No longer can we remain passive and allow others to lead. And then second, from Martin Luther King, the night before he was assassinated:

“I may not get there with you, but we as a people will get to the promised land.”

We.Are.The.Leaders.

Obama needs us. America needs us.  Add value.

We can only surmise how this country might have responded if Robert F. Kennedy has lived to achieve the greatest office in the land, but consider what he said in 1961:

“Laws can embody standards; governments can enforce laws — but the final task is not a task for government. It is a task for each and every one of us. Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted — when we tolerate what we know to be wrong — when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy, or too frightened — when we fail to speak up and speak out — we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.”

Can we do it?  Yes we can.

Voting has been on my mind recently. I saw a link from techmeme to a video that is no longer there, but I wanted to share it with you. It’s done by Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and a University professor of Stanford. It’s entitled, “20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack” and deserves a look.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

At first glance, its sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it? The US is to blame because a foreign leader is killed on foriegn soil? A deeper look reveals a shadier underbelly that most Americans would rather not admit.

Americans don’t settle for the peace loving type of presidents. You remember the kid on the playground that stole your lunch money and threatened to pop you in the face if you told anyone? That’s how we like our presidents and we’ve been voting for these types since time began. The only exception, in my mind, being Jimmy Carter, and let’s face it, the republicans really had no shot in that election.

People fancy that John F. Kennedy would have removed us from Viet-nam. Only with perspective do we think getting out of Viet-nam was a good idea. Any attempt to de-escalate that war would have painted Kennedy or Johnson as soft on communism, setting the stage for exactly what we got in 1968, a Nixon presidency.

Liberals have been branded as big spenders and rightly so. But the conservatives are every bit as big of a spender as any liberal. They just spend money on different things. The cost of policing the world AND subsidizing businesses and citizens have created a national debt of 9 trillion and rising. We have a spending addiction because we think we can print money whenever we need it. And fighting a nameless, faceless enemy is pretty expensive. It also forces us to get embroiled in a foreign government’s state of affairs so much that the line is blurred as to where their sovereignty begins and our policing ends.

Contrary to our wishes, we’ve set up a Pax Americana, waged with weapons of war upon the world.

As long as our policy remains getting involved in conflicts we have no business being in (either morally or monetarily), we’ll continue to shoulder the blame for the problems of the world.

And no matter the candidate that gets elected next November, they’ll be forced into a policy that deep down we can’t live without. We won’t allow our president to be “soft on terrorism” and we’ll demand that whoever our enemy is at the time, they must be brought to justice. The Axis of Evil will still be there in November and if left un-checked our very way of life, our own survival, will be at risk. We can’t sit idly by.

After all, it’s the american way.