*Now* will they STFU?!

Barack Obama made me cry again.

This time it wasn’t because I was angry or frustrated or betrayed. This time it was because I was touched, moved emotionally by the connection I felt while watching a clip of him addressing his campaign workers.

When the president became emotional while thanking his team, his voice cracking, I did too. I felt connected to him again, inspired, ready to roll up my sleeves and help advance his proposals because this is a good guy, a sensitive and compassionate man who really does have our best interests at heart, who’s still that seemingly rare politician who wants to make things better for everyone, not just for himself. I wanted to shake his hand and thank him for giving me reason to lose my cynicism, at least for now, and ask him how I could help move the country forward.

Then I remembered the GOP.

Apparently House Speaker John Boehner has already announced that the Republicans “will not allow” any tax hikes, even for the richest of the rich. (As my friend Jim Bull says, “I guess he was asleep on Tuesday night and nobody has told him yet that his party got a whooping!”) My cynicism and pessimism came rushing back and I thought, “There’s no way this election’s going to change any minds on Capitol Hill. It’s back to business as usual.” This too, made me feel like crying.

The brilliant Rachel Maddow – and say what you will about her liberal leanings or occasionally shrill diatribes, but she is brilliant – was amazing the day after the election when discussing how conservatives reacted to the “shellacking” they received, how they were in their own bubble where up is down and bad is good and they couldn’t believe or accept what was actually happening. One piece of her monologue was especially memorable:

Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.

She talked about how we, the American people, are being robbed by the current dysfunction in politics, how our two-party system is supposed to result in productive debate from which the best solutions emerge for the good of all of us rather than the butting of heads and stalemates and discord and refusal to compromise that are part and parcel of today’s political process. It was really good stuff.

It’s easy at this point, I suppose, for progressives to gloat and point fingers and demand that the other side change their evil ways. Tuesday night was a huge victory for us, and to the victors go the spoils. But even if we had lost – even if the dreaded Romney presidency had become reality and the world had all but ended for many of us – I still would have bemoaned the current process, with its divisiveness and rancor and infuriating ineffectiveness.

I just probably wouldn’t have quoted Maddow.

The Three Stooges

I hope for change. I hope Cantor, Boehner, McConnell, Rove and the other GOP stalwarts can accept that Tuesday night was a “come to Jesus” moment for them, that their current modus operandi is no longer acceptable, if it ever was, and that they need to focus on helping to craft sound public policy rather than working exclusively to gain power in an increasingly putrid atmosphere. Representing conservative interests and lying, cheating and stealing in order to win are two decidedly different things.

And I hope Janine Turner, Victoria Jackson, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Beck, Trump, Nugent and the other irresponsible noisemakers will just STFU now. There’s work to be done.