I’d be lying if I said I thought this was going to be a fix for everything, though I enjoy the share the wealth aspect of Obama’s platform and the fact that he’s so forthright in talking about it that way. I’d like decently priced heath care as well. Living in Vermont means that it’s pretty much academic who I voted for at a national level. It’s nice, still, to like all my national-level representatives in Congress. Then again, the political climate in this state is one of the reasons I moved to Vermont and a continuing reason I stay here.

I spent last night having ice cream with friends by the fire up the road from here having walked there with two laptops in my backpack, one for work (MetaFilter requires more attention during big events, not less) and one for watching streaming video. I spent a lot of the evening watching my friends color in maps of the US, chatting with people all over the world, and listening to the returns on NPR. I walked home last night in a totally quiet neighborhood where most people had gone to bed before the race was called.

Barack Obama is the only president-elect that I have ever met. He came to the Blogger Breakfast when I was at the DNC and spoke to us about the power of the Internet, etc. I remember being surprised that someone running for Senator would even bother to take fifteen minutes to talk to thirty or so web dorks. I remember that he was tall and he smiled a lot. The speech he gave at the DNC was only one of only two that mentioned libraries (Kerry’s was the other) and one of five that mentioned gay people (one of two not given by a gay person) and it was one of the only ones that mentioned civil liberties or really interested me and my self-interests much at all.

Keeping it in perspective, he still voted for the telecom immunity bill and he’s pretty middle of the road for my tastes, but anyone electable would be. I head off to Kansas today to talk about rural libraries and computers and I’ll be curious to get a read from people there — and from Colorodo which is my next step on this trip — what, if anything, they think has changed in their worlds.