You must remember this...

...even if you didn't like last night's outcome. Jeff Jacoby is a conservative columnist with the Boston Globe and normally a reliably knee-jerk mouthpiece for GOP talking points. But I thought he struck exactly the right note in the concluding paragraph of this morning's column, when he declared,

"As a politician and policymaker, Obama distresses me; his extreme liberalism is not what the nation needs. But as a symbol - a son of Africa elected to lead a majority-white nation that once enslaved Africans and treated their descendants with great cruelty - Obama's rise makes me proud of my country. The anthem of the Civil Rights Movement was "We Shall Overcome." Impossible as it might have seemed scant decades ago, we have."

Everyone should be proud of this victory, because it offers fresh evidence of this country's ability to adapt, learn, change and re-invent itself. No other nation does that better.