Five Good Things About the 2012 Election

Barack Obama won a second term. I’m glad about that, but I didn’t feel like popping balloons and shooting fireworks on election night.

This campaign season was crazy, disheartening, hideously expensive and unconscionably long. And what do we have at the end of it? Same President, same Speaker of the House, same Senate Majority Leader, and more or less the same divided Congress. Is there any hope that our elected leaders will solve any of our pressing problems in the next four years, or will it be the same old gridlock?

Now that a week has passed, and some of the dust has settled, I find a few signs of hope in last Tuesday’s results.

1. Big Money didn’t buy our votes. This was our first presidential contest since the Citizens United ruling. Corporations and SuperPacs spent $billions to elect Mitt Romney and other candidates who would do things their way. For the most part, they lost.
2. Health care reform (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it) has survived a Supreme Court challenge and a slew of candidates who vowed to repeal it. Looks like it'll stick around long enough for all its provisions to go into effect. I don’t doubt it will be a rocky road. But I’d rather see the country go down that road, making course corrections as needed, than go back to the way things were.
3. Outrageous comments about rape did not win over the electorate. Missouri’s Todd Akin (legitimate rape rarely causes pregnancy) and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (if it does, it’s a gift from God) lost their Senate bids.
4. We will, in fact, see some new faces in the Senate, and they aren't all tea-party favorites like Ted Cruz (newly elected in my home state). The League of Conservation voters reports that seven of eight environmentally-minded candidates won. And come January, we’ll have more women in the Senate than ever before. Maybe these leaders will find something better to do than deny climate change and block access to birth control.
5. Texas is still very much a red state, but our House of Representatives will be less lopsidedly Republican than it was during the last session. I suppose that's something.