^{This is an edit of a piece I shared some time before the president backed himself against the ropes at Denver.} 

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     I wanted the president to win four years ago. I'm delighted to be alive this night as he is now re-elected. My sole regrets are that my civil rights- and labor-activist mom never knew this president's history-upending candidacies and wins -- she died well too young at forty-five in 1973 -- and that dad did not live to see Mr. Obama's first election reaffirmed.

     As for me, I wanted this more, far more, than I wanted him to win four years back. This is for my son; it will frame his adulthood. 

     I'm delighted for reasons having less to do with specific policy-content than with what his re-election means to me emblematically. The specifics, the details, I've made clear over time, here and at numbers of other sites and in a variety of iterations. I am delighted tonight most for what one might call process-and-cultural reasons.


. I am pleased that those who have tried to deny voting rights in over thirty states a half century since the Voting Rights Act, in order to suppress the votes of minorities, students, and the infirm elderly...I am delighted they have been slapped across their collective very ugly mug and soul so hard that no party may well dream of trying to enact this evil again.

. I'm thrilled that the extremism of the Tea Party has run into a ditch from which it may well not in our lifetimes paw its way out.

. I'm happy that the misogyny far too many Republican candidates foment and tolerate is discredited to the point that it cannot be defended or promoted with a straight face in national debate.

. I'm next-to-ecstatic that the religious-based hateful rhetoric, overt and more subtle and cynically deployed against this president by those who see American religious minorities as problematic at best...that this vile rhetoric has taken a terrible, lasting hit.

. I an pleased that the minority of my fellow American Jews, my fellow Zionists, who think that only their favored Israeli political parties' positions must control my nation's Near East policies without genuine give-and-take between intelligent allies...I am pleased those Jews have seen this president receive at least 75% of Jews' votes. (Jews' voted for the president in 2008 by 78%.) And I want, in time, for them to see that Israel is in fact safer when real, even edgy, back-and-forth, takes place.

.  I am pleased that re-election has shown that the 'Citizens United' Court decision has been a wholesale failure in accomplishing what it was designed to do  --  derail Mr. Obama and others by allowing billionaires and corporations to hijack the democratic process.

. I am thrilled that this leader who stood up for thoroughgoing equality under law for LGBT citizens, has been roundly approved by our national electorate.

. I am happy that the strenuous efforts to return my country to a pre-New Deal, venal public-be-damned, communitarianism-be-damned ethos are tonight soundly repudiated.

. I am grateful that the men and women who serve in our military will continue to be served by a president who has won their support through positive behavior toward them and by rejecting jingoistic and simplistic knee-jerk behavior designed for domestic political consumption by the least intelligent, the most cowardly armchair-generals among us.

. Perhaps, now, no one will again say with a straight face that '08 was somehow an historical anomaly which has now been 'remedied'.

. I now, happily, have a chance to help enact health care legislation that goes well further than the Affordable Care Act does toward universal coverage.

. I have again a president who respects religion enough to know that our Constitution wisely restricts religious institutions' influence in public life and in law.

. I am thoroughly pleased that the sole true genius of American Exceptionalism continues to be raised up by our leadership for what it is: our Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

. There will be a chance again, and in my wife's lifetime and in mine, and in my son's young adulthood...a chance at having once again a Supreme Court and Federal Court system that honors the Justice ideals that our parents held and taught us and that we have taught our son.
 

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One more:

I've won a bet on a terrific steak dinner at either Timpanos or The Palm...or a dry bagel at a deli...as well as for a fine victory cigar, with a former student, a very fine young guy who also supported Mr. Romney. I'm also the cheapest guy I know and needed the win.