So I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to spend this election night – I ended up watching the poll #s way earlier than I ended up being comfortable with (how do you call a state that only has 2% of their votes counted?!), then took a break and didn’t end up sitting back down at the computer until apparently the networks were all ready to start calling it! I have issues with that when they had literally just started counting votes on the west coast and maybe we’ll talk about that another day, but instead I ended up just settling in over at the SourceFed live feed on YouTube. I’ve really been enjoying their take on presenting the news over the past couple of months, so it was nice to listen in on a younger, less stuffy post-election discussion about voting and politics and everything while we waited first for Romney to give his concession speech, then for President Obama to accept.
I’m not gonna lie, this victory definitely feels different than the election four years ago when Obama was first elected into office, and I guess the best way for me to describe it is that I think I feel more relieved than excited for the President to get another four years to finish the things that he’s started. My own “approval rating” for the President is probably somewhere between 70-80% right now – there have definitely been some areas that he’s failed to deliver on, but then again, he’s also had some impressive victories as well and we should’ve known four years ago that a single term wasn’t going to be the magic ticket for a lot of the issues that our nation faces right now. Hell, I’m sure that a lot of them still won’t be fixed in the next four years, either, because some of our problems are just too damn big at this point to have an easy answer anymore.
Still, I’m relieved that Romney didn’t get elected because I firmly believe that he would’ve been many giant leaps backwards from where we’re trying to go as a nation. I mean, he’s even said it himself how he wants to reverse several of Obama’s key decisions on day #1 in office, and like them or not, I just don’t have any respect for a leader whose first motive in office is to take us backwards instead of forward. Obama may still have a lot of work to do, but at least his plans don’t involve leveling the whole place and starting from scratch on his first day at work…
I am, I’m sure like most other people, looking forward to politics taking more of a backseat role in my life again at least for a little while. I’m sure the republicans are going to be whining like crazy over this setback in the weeks to come, but at least going back to politics only being on the news and not in my mailbox, and my online ads, and my voicemail will be a bit of a temporary reprieve.
Tomorrow will be a new day, and one where we no longer have to worry about the possibility of a Romney/Ryan presidency, but we still have an awful lot of work to do.