How to Win Friends and Influence People: The Blogger's Version

It feels good, doesn't it?

I admit that I'm awfully happy that it appears that Bush won, and I'm a tiny bit relieved just to have the process over. Later I'll look at some of the other national and (Colorado) local races and issues, but wanted to offer a word of advice for the conservative camp.

Let's make gracious, humble, and polite our watchwords for the day. No matter how much we feel like gloating, the people who saw their candidate lose are in large part principled, intelligent people who believed he would take the country in a better direction than Bush will. I don't agree with them, but that doesn't make them punching bags now that America has spoken.

Kerry supporters are people that we will have to work with (and against, at times) to help make the decisions that will keep America safe, guard our shores from future attacks, and protect the long-term safety of our economy. It is much easier to work with people who don't hate us and who have seen us at your best when it would have been so easy to be at our worst.

Here's to a hard fought election, and, yes, here's to winning, but I feel right now like I did when Saddam Hussein's regime fell. That day, the first thing I said to my girlfriend was, "Okay, that was the easy part."

No mistake, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed and an uphill battle to fix them. Now the hard work starts.

And let's not even talk about 2008 for a while, okay?