President Obama - sounds so good

"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

I think this single sentence summed up the entire campaign, movement and storm that gathered in the last two years. It is the ultimate gut punch to the sinister pretend pragmatism that insists we cannot have health care for everyone, that concern for the poor will crash the economy, that negotiations are a sign of weakness. We are better than that, and not because we are somehow a special place, a city on a hill, but because we decide to be. We choose to be better than that. And the day we decide not to be, the day we start acting like we aren't, is the day we won't be better than that.

Obama's election is in so many ways a rejection of that rationale given for every reprehensible action of the Bush presidency: we did it because we had to. That's the logic of a child, not an adult. It's the thing every teenager caught over his head gasps out at his parents: "I didn't have any choice, I had to do it." There is always a choice. It might mean pain, it might mean sacrifice, but there is always the choice to be the better man, the better nation.