Obama victory says yes to American values

What couldn’t be doubted, with the defeat of Mitt Romney, is that, despite some of the more egregious patterns of American life, we are not extremists, and that his attempt to embrace the more radical elements of the Republican agenda, did not play well in Peoria, or the rest of the country, the South excepted.

The centrist position, as proven in the past, by Bill Clinton wins presidential elections.

America is not a country, despite its flaws, that wants to take extreme positions and have politicians utter such absurdities as pregnancies, resulting from rape, are a gift from God.

It also, with apologies to Donald Trump, does not concern itself with the so-called “birther” movement directed against President Obama.

The electorate also realizes that when someone changes their position repeatedly, as did Romney that they can’t be trusted.  After all, this is the same Romney who not too long ago claimed that he was more liberal than Ted Kennedy, and even was pro-choice.

This, of course, in political jargon, is called flip-flopping, and while that might have worked in the campaign headquarters, the majority of America saw through the sham.

But, Obama, gave America an honest core, and while not blind to the work that must be done, did not give us the hyperbole of a Michelle Bachman who claimed that the government was riddled with radical Muslims, or the rants of Trump, and the challenges to the traditional separation of church and state by Rick Santorum.

What we did see, sadly, was that the racial divisions in America, still so strongly evident in the South, where the overwhelmingly support, for Romney, told the rest of the nation that they were willing to pay higher taxes than the rich, and have almost no health care, to avoid seeing a black man occupy, again, the highest office in the land.

But, the era of Jim Crow is over, the benighted arguments, and the beatings of the Pettis Bridge have been pushed back into the recesses of this country’s consciousness.

While the road ahead will not be easy – thanks to Republican partisanship – we have to remind ourselves as Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

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