As much as I have been looking forward to an Obama victory, I have been looking forward to this almost as much.

Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America?  etc.

Those are really great questions and the kind of questions I might ask.

The country needs a Republican party that can give sensible answers to difficult questions like those, but I fear that we’ll have to endure a few more years of fire and brimstone and government-knows-best,  anti-intellectual evangelicals before the sensible conservatives get their hands back on the steering wheel.

I will watch the debate and hope for the best.

Or maybe he didn’t deserve us. Or so says, the WSJ.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

It might be something to do with the fact that

According to recent Gallup polls, the president’s average approval rating is below 30% — down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.

No doubt the WSJ will be supportive of the new administration. For fear of encouraging our enemies.

Oh, that’s nice!

1000s more like it here. Bring a hankie.

Speaking of the future, Slate has an excellent discussion about the future of conservatism. Go read it.

I have read lots of commentary about the significance of Obama’s election but none have resonated the way this did.

Obama’s idea, put simply, was that America can be better than it has been. It can reach beyond post-9/11 anger and fear to embody once more what the world still craves from the American idea: hope.

America can mean what it says. It can respect its friends and probe its enemies before it tries to shock and awe them. It can listen. It can rediscover the commonwealth beyond the frenzied individualism that took down Wall Street.

I know, these are mere words. They will not right the deficit or disarm an enemy. But words count. That has been a lesson of the Bush years.

You can’t proclaim freedom as you torture. You can’t promote democracy as you disappear people. You can’t stand for the rule of law and strip prisoners of basic rights. You can’t dispense with the transparency and regulation essential to modern capital markets and hope still to be the beacon of free enterprise.

Or rather, you can do all these things, but then you find yourself alone.

Obama will reinvest words with meaning. That is the basis of everything. And an American leader able to improvise a grammatical, even a moving, English sentence is no bad thing. Americans, in the inevitable recession ahead, will have a leader who can summon their better natures rather than speak, as Bush has, to their spite.

Maybe it is because the writer is also an expat Englishman. Roger Cohen cast his first vote as an American citizen for Barack Obama, as I will cast my first vote for his *re-election.

* Assuming he doesn’t suck (2 down, 1 to go)