First off, apologies for the delay in writing about the election. When it was all said and done, I found myself at first paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the moment, and since then so full of thoughts that it was impossible to make much sense of them. I still feel a bit like that, but I’m going to attempt a cohesive thread.

The Obamas: Putting the "first" into the First Family

That Barack Obama won so handily came as no surprise to me (though the electoral numbers ended up even a bit bigger than the most positive polling suggested), given his message and the real wants and needs of mainstream America — not to mention the audacious atrocity that was the McCain campaign. For months, however, the actual narrative of Obama’s journey has been lost in the details (of attack ads and policy pronouncements, gotchas and gaffes, pitbulls and plumbers). It reared its head again on Tuesday as soon as the first results starting coming in, and it is this: Americans have elected a black man as president, and (in modern terms, at least) by a landslide. But a sad truth is that the epochal nature of this moment hasn’t hit everyone — in fact, I’ve talked to a number of people here in southcentral Kentucky who either don’t recognize what a moment this is or who cynically dismiss it as being of little real importance.

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