“Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known
As Camelot.”

Barack Obama’s victory last night is being hailed by most as a “landslide.”  While there is no official definition of just what constitutes a landslide, I tend to agree that an electoral vote margin of at least 138 (as of this writing, the electoral vote count stands at Obama 338, McCain 160, with 40 not yet decided) and a popular vote margin of over six million votes represents a landslide or, at the very least, a substantial mandate.  With the size of this win, Barack Obama will enter the Whitehouse without a Joe Btfsplk cloud of Florida 2000 or Ohio 2004 following overhead.

In his acceptance speech a couple of hours ago, Obama restated his much quoted line from his 2004 DNC keynote address, “…we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and always will be, the United States of America.”

And with belief-in-the-future chants of, “yes we can; yes we can; yes we can” in place of the stuck-in-the-past “drill, baby, drill” echoing in the background, Obama acknowledged the road will not be an easy one.  Nor will we get there in one year, or two years.  But we finally have a leader in whom we can believe and to whom we can look to begin repairing that which is so badly broken.

Breaking from the “I got mine; you’ll have to get your own” neo-conservatism of the past eight years, Obama has challenged us to “…summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility.  Where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look, not only after ourselves, but after each other.” 

He derided “…the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long…” and asked, instead, that we look to the values Lincoln took to the Whitehouse – self reliance, individual liberty and national unity.  Obama pointed the direction in which we must head and quoted Lincoln saying, “We are not enemies, but friends.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

With “…tonight we proved once more that the strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals – democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope…” the President-elect began setting the places at his round table.

Last night, the dying embers of Hope were fanned back into flame by the vision and fortitude of another young man from Illinois.  One who, like the one before him who had to sneak into Washington to assume the mantle of leadership, is determined to repair the rifts in this great nation and steer the ship of state clear of the rocks towards which winds of the past eight years have driven it.

Not since 1960; not since John F. Kennedy challenged us with “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country;” and not since the last inhabitants of Camelot shouldered the yoke of ensuring the freedom of all Americans has the election of a President imbued us with such hope, such belief in our possibilities and such faith in the future as we see today.

My hope is that Camelot is, indeed, returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.