What did in McCain and the GOP is simple; given total power for most of the last 8 years, they revealed themselves as a bunch of people who, if hooked up to a greed meter, would burst it. As for Obama, he's clearly an intelligent and, I think, decent man who will make things better and perhaps get Americans to become more active as citizens, but the powerful forces that control us didn't get where they are by backing down. Time will tell. Bush and Cheney? May I suggest George eat more pretzels and Dick put more salt on his french fries?

Sir;... What Mr. Gergen said was huey... There is not going to be a stampede to the left... There may be a stampede toward justice and equity in this land, but the necessity of dealing and wheeling in a world with so many who have so much at stake, and so much of the old, dragging them back into the past will keep us just about dead center, and I do mean dead.... Some people who spend a great deal of their lives sowing division say secession because they can take no lesson from the past... But for the majority of us; we are looking for a new day, and I would say a new form, meaning a new form of relationship, a new form of government, and new form of economy, and even a new form of understanding of each other and what it means to be human... I am proud of us... I never doubted my ability to see black people as equals, endowed with the same rights as myself... But I doubted my fellow Americans... I did not think we had the courage to make that fateful step into the future, all together and on purpose... It is a triumph of hope over fear... It is the victory of dreams over pain... I was so wrong, and I am so proud; and I do not doubt that if Mr. Obama was deprived of all his senses and had left only the ability to love that he could make better choices than Mr. Bush or Mr. Mccain... Some things no man can give to another... You cannot give a man brains or the sense to use the ones he's got... You cannnot give a man ambition, but Mr. Bush had that... And you cannot give anyone a sense of consequences, that is, that people get hurt, suffer and die, as a consequence of stupidity, and it never says Stupidity as a cause of death on the certificate, so people never take a lesson from it... WE have plenty of mean hearted, uneducated, superstitious people in this land... We see what happens when they get a hold of the process... But they have gone no where, and will go no where, and the only thing that is going to cure them in the least is working government... To see ourselves empowered by government we have to see them empowered, but that should have the same meaning for us both... If democracy is going to work, government must be able and willing to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves... Other than that, it should leave us be so long as we mind our own affairs.... We need to fix government, and Mr. Obama is only a step in that direction... To fix government means no individual issue, and no local issue will be held hostage to a national party goal... We can have anything we want from government, and we will never get anything we want from government so long as parties can trade on our needs to satify their wants... And I want to tell you, laws are made for the benefit of a handful of people in this country which hurt everyone... And laws are made to curb individual behavior that hurts no one but the few who engage in it, -until law makes them suffer... People with twisted minds and twisted souls have been running this place for a long time because hate appeals to the godlike, but it is not right, nor just, and it does not serve peace, freedom, or prosperity... Thanks...Sweeney