With Jeff's indulgence, I'll take this to make a non-partisan political post. I've been happy on the morning after election day, and more often sad, and even thoroughly confused. But this time, it really is different.

Last night was a great American moment. A moment when the Presidency of these United States was transferred from a man who father was President to a man whose mother had to make ends meet on food stamps. A man who, only a half century ago, would have been denied the right to vote in many parts of this country. America feels like a bigger place today, and a better one.

I think John McCain recognized that and last night we saw a good man who loves his country more than he hates losing. That was the speech of an American hero.

John McCain's is a great American story, but it's a story that's been told before.

Barack Obama's is a new and different story, and I think it's a story that Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and John Winthrop and Martin Luther King would have embraced because it is a story of opportunity and hope, a story about change and redemption, a story about how we rise above our differences and reinvent ourselves even in our most trying hours.

And what could be more American than that?

I have never been more proud to be an American than I am this morning.

allen