Now that the election cycle has ended:

[reverend_kate]

Aside from the obvious (we actually have this awesome guy for our president? You mean we get to keep him?), there's a couple things I'm happy about:

- The (possible?) return of John McCain, senior Senator from Arizona. The campaign was messy and ugly at the end, and it's easy to forget McCain's track record. He has consistently demonstrated himself

Comments

[kevissimo]

Amen, sister.

[nyuanshin]

I can go along with most of that. Except McCain being a good guy -- I don't get the love for him among Democrats, since he's every bit as cavalier about, say, freedom of speech as any book-banning Republican and would institute a draft if he could. I really don't think the fact that he sits uncomfortably in his own party should blind anybody to that kind of stuff.

[nyuanshin]

(In any case, I stand by my creeping dementia conjecture and suspect he'll bow out in 2012.)

[dcjaywalk]

McCain's certainly been erratic during the Shrub administration, but I would attribute this to the level of pressure that has been placed on him... eventually he just cracked, and went from maverick to meek party-line senator. I think it's really indicative of the state of the country that his own chosen political party managed to do what three years of torture in Hanoi could not.

I think the Obama victory could be exactly what John McCain needed to get the Straight Talk Express going again, because the pressure to go along with the radical right is now off. He isn't going to run for president again, not at his age, but we really could use the old McCain in the Senate.

[nyuanshin]

This is pretty much the usual line from Dems who want to like McCain, but it doesn't really have much basis in his biography and character. I highly recommend Matt Welch's book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick if you want a sympathetic but unflinchingly critical attempt to understand what the man is really about.