Well, dude actually pulled it off. I don't know what to say. Truth be told, I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago stricken with an abrupt, late-blooming fear that Obama was going to lose the election. (I think it's all the time I've been spending reading NRO's The Corner.) By all accounts he was up, but, as the saying goes: "who are you going to believe: the desperate hopes of white racists or your lying black eyes?" Over-confidence is a sin, but there is something deeply sad (and borderline pathological) about how a history of losses trains you to distrust your instincts. Having experienced this campaign, or more to the point, having my side win this campaign, it will become easier to lay down in bed and tamp down future night terrors, get some sleep so I can get to work in the morning.

Until you have that first win, you just don't know what's possible. And once you have that first win, things are just plain different. Some of you know that among my various side hustles is managing websites, and I owe my entire career pretty much to the fact I have a single metrical win on my resume - blackplanet.com. That's it, and my first time at bat, too, BLAM, out of the park. It's like going to Yale: I will be 100 and there will still be practical professional use-value to be extracted to having managed BP last century. Yes, being the one time ruler of a kingdom devoted largely to black-on-black nookie (and it's various admirers) is a step below running the free world, but a win is a win, right? The fact that I inherited an amazing software platform, was privileged to work with an amazing group of people, was hooked-up with a gig by a bud, and was essentially in the right place at the right time in history, are the end, for me to know, and for you to find out. (By which I mean, "for you to find out" if you ever hope for me to respect you. Nothing warms me to another human being like gentle cynicism about random-but-generally generally praised people, places and things.)

But winning changes things. I don't know about every thing, but definitely some of them. For example: even up until a few days ago, I would not have bet my life on a black man being elected the president of the United States. Several hundred dollars in donations, a few hours phone banking, lots and lots of forwarding, phone calls and so on, sure, but my life? No way, and therein lies the difference between me and Barack Obama. The power of leverage is such that my meager contribution can be multiplied into real power when the right tools are in place, but at the end of the day I would have been heartbroken if Obama had lost but not necessarily surprised. Next time around, though, in whatever shape next time takes, I will have new data to help me make a decision: "it's possible for black men to win the highest office in the land." That is a truly nifty piece of information to carry around with you.

Last night my man Wesley was texting this to everyone he knew: "Whitey may be on the moon, but we're in the white house!" Someone shot back, quick as digital lightening: "Fuck that: We're going there, too. Mars, bitches!"

Why the fuck not? I thought. Who better to send us to Mars than a black president? And that, my friends, is changed between today and yesterday. More shit is suddenly possible, some of it wonderfully outlandish. I have been reading a lot about the meaning of conservatism the last few days on the right wing blogs. This is what Peggy Noonan had to offer:

Prudence. A sense of reality. Understanding limits. Respect for tradition — it didn’t happen by accident.

Seriously, fuck all that shit. My disinterest in the above is, in underlying terms, why I am not and will never be a conservative. I am a citizen of a country that does not fully exist yet, although, by becoming a country where a black man can become president, we got significantly closer. But ultimately, I think I am a citizen of the United States of Space. I hear the president of that shit is a Kenyan-American Hawaiian.