The end of the beginning, and the beginning of the middle.

I'm still looking for the right language to describe the sense of victory/joy/success/affirmation/realignment/booyah to capture my feelings about the country and its choice of President a few days ago.

So this post will be short on that language.

But I do think it's important to chart the journey of Nation Indivisible over the past few months, and look at how my own thinking has been shaped by this blog, and others, since our first post in January.

This is the 105th post to the blog since that time, for an average of about one post every three days. That's about half of my ideal, and about ten times what I thought would ever happen. POHS and DMW have committed themselves to this idea and have always challenged me to come up with something to top their inventive, entertaining, and always perspicacious posts, and that teamwork is certainly at the root of our continued success at growing Nation Indivisible.

CTL, who as of yet hasn't posted to the blog (or even commented on it publicly), recently assured me that she reads it, and that we should keep going with it, and that's a huge help, too.

Looking back at the first entry, I remember the cold night in Concord when, warmed by the promise of an America driven by hope rather than fear, I started this blog. Or, more accurately, took this blog out of my head, where it had been regularly updating since November 2000, and made it slightly more tangible. I remember thinking about how wonderful it would be to see a country united again; a country that shared a sense of a brighter future; a country that got a little better every day. And, yes, it seemed like Barack Obama would be a good president, too, but this, for me, has always been less about Obama the man, and more about Obama the movement -- about people emerging from the politics of fear and choosing the politics of hope. That's not about one man, or one moment. That's about our national character and it's ability to shake off the last eight years of misdirection. And when we did that on Tuesday, I was the happiest I've ever been.

Now, certainly, that's mostly because so far I haven't done the really happy things: I haven't been engaged, or married, or had a child. So national pride can still register on my scale. But even so, I was surprised by the strength of my emotion, by the depth of my patriotism, and by the real sense of belonging to something greater than myself that I felt on that warm Tuesday night, just watching television with good friends.

To be sure, most of that something greater was a sense of kinship with this nation indivisible. But a good measure was a sense of having shared a more specific journey with some people who, though I've never met them, were my regular companions -- often for hours every day -- throughout this process. They're all linked over on the right: Josh Marshall and Greg Sargent at talkingpointsmemo.com, Nate and Sean at fivethirtyeight.com, Andrew Sullivan...they all helped me to shape my own ideas about this race with commentary that ran in almost real time, almost 24 hours a day. We crow about our 105 posts in a year -- these guys were getting close to that in a week (or, in Andrew Sullivan's case, a day). We're amateurs, they're pros, and the difference is clear.

Still, in the coming months, I hope that Nation Indivisible continues to provide it's unique voice to this new America. I hope that we are able to increasingly move from showing you what we're watching, to telling you what we're thinking, to describing how we're translating those thoughts into concrete action. Because if there is one thing that Tuesday made plain to me, it's that just watching, while sometimes very, very good, isn't good enough.

JEK
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