With so much to do, no time for euphoria's hangover
The crews from Streets & Sanitation spend Wednesday morning picking up the last remnants of the Election Night party in Grant Park. Journalists from around the world pack up their gear, and maybe snap up a few more Barack Obama souvenirs before bidding Chicago adieu - probably until President Obama kicks off the 2016 Olympic Games.
And liberals, drunk with success, nurse the hangover that accompanies an overabundance of euphoria.
While Republican leaders and conservatives are quick to talk about how they must learn from Tuesday's crushing defeats, Democrats and liberals need an education primer, too.
This nation can change directions faster than Cubs playoff hopes.
In 1992, I wrote a now-embarrassingly giddy column about how the nation really turned a corner on race relations, surely did get "kinder, gentler" and truly was ready to unite as "we the people" all because of that year's election results. After all, Bill Clinton, the man from Hope, Ark., was going to start building that bridge to the next century with the help of liberal Democrats such as Carol Moseley Braun - who was the woman in what was dubbed "The Year of the Woman."
What a turnaround that victory was for Democrats, considering President George H.W. Bush had a 92 percent approval rating just a year earlier.
Sigh.
Two years later, I was lamenting a GOP blitzkrieg that saw Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich saddle up as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for Clinton and the liberal agenda. Even crooked Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski lost his seat (which later was held by Rod Blagojevich and currently occupied by Rahm Emanuel) to a 32-year-old GOP neophyte named Michael Flanagan.
Democrats were dazed.
Then Clinton spanked Dole in 1996.
Then George W. Bush went into overtime in 2000 before being awarded the White House in the longest election campaign in American history (until this one).
After the 2004 election, in a column headlined "What next, liberals? Suicide? Toronto? Booze? Get religion?" I marveled at how the inept John Kerry managed to turn his war hero status into a liability, and I muttered in print about how far right our nation had turned.
Then, in what the stock market would dub a routine correction, 2006 gave us House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a turn to the left and hints that what was left of the GOP insurgency was in its last throes.
And Republicans might feel finished today after their war hero candidate got beaten soundly by Barack Hussein Obama, and even dependable Red States such as Indiana woke up Wednesday feeling Blue.
But as we should know by now, "change" is more than a campaign slogan. Sports cars on TV commercials don't make as many sharp turns as the U.S. voters.
We also should know by now that liberals and Democrats can't necessarily lead a nation in a direction that 55 million McCain voters didn't want to go. The nation was split after the 2000 election between Al Gore and Bush, and McCain got 5 million more votes than either of those guys.
"Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long," Obama said during a speech that was more somber and serious than the joy leading up to it.
In a concession speech that set the perfect tone, McCain urged all Americans to offer Obama "our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary compromises, to bridge our differences, and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited."
We can't gloat. We can't give up. We can't put politics above country. We've got too much to do.
"You have earned the new puppy that is coming with us to the White House," Obama told daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.
That is the only promise Obama made during this entire campaign that he can accomplish without help, sacrifice and compromise from Democrats, Republicans and the American people.