A nice view from my hotel room, past Obama headquarters across the street, where the lights never turned off, to the lake. A warm glow of a sunrise on a balmy fall day. It makes me reflective.
I’m hoping, of course, that today will be a fresh start, a first step toward national renewal. But of course those first steps have already been taken by millions of people, on their own, in their own different ways, over the past four years. Today is neither the beginning nor the end, but just an important landmark along the way.
My own first steps were not heroic or graceful, a series of small stuttering steps that eventually led to big changes. I was practicing law in Missouri, more or less happily, and enjoying our two toddlers, when Hurricane Katrina hit my home state. It was wrenching to watch from afar, a maddening combination of an intimate knowledge of the people and the place, a powerlessness to help, and a growing rage over the inhumane response and the cynical indifference.
Katrina crystallized for me what I wanted for myself. Within a year I’d decided to leave the law and return to journalism, trading a stable traditional career for a chance with a small start-up, TPM.
I don’t mean to put my journey up against the far more consequential and in some cases heroic efforts of so many others. The point is that for many people the effort to reshape the country, to get it back on track, to end the descent into corruption, cronyism, and a creeping anti-constitutionalism, began years ago and required real risk and sacrifice.
By comparison, voting is easy.
