The biggest, best-informed and most-representative electorate in American history made its choice yesterday, electing the nation’s first ever African American president by a decisive margin.

I spent Election Day prowling the polls across Albuquerque with my colleague Alicia Lueras Maldonado, looking for people’s personal voting stories and keeping an eye out for trouble.

In New Mexico, so many voters cast their vote early or by absentee ballot that most of the polls we visited were practically deserted. At many sites, poll workers and election protection workers outnumbered actual voters.

But we did manage to snag a few people out voting the old-fashioned way.

Most voters we talked to said they did hours of research on the candidates’ positions before they made their choice. Continue reading →

This pretty much sums it up. Couldn’t put it better, so I won’t even try.

The monster years

Last night wasn’t just a victory for tolerance; it wasn’t just a mandate for progressive change; it was also, I hope, the end of the monster years.

What I mean by that is that for the past 14 years America’s political life has been largely dominated by, well, monsters. Monsters like Tom DeLay, who suggested that the shootings at Columbine happened because schools teach students the theory of evolution. Monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people.

And in our national discourse, we pretended that these monsters were reasonable, respectable people. To point out that the monsters were, in fact, monsters, was “shrill.”

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner