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Look, I understand the whole "proud of our heritage" thing, but... Naming a state forest after the First Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? Really?

Publius makes a point that I would like to extend:

Any way you slice it, the 2008 election should be seen as a massive repudiation of the George W. Bush administration. Karl Rove's project failed miserably. Bush is instead bequeathing large Democratic majorities to the next president. And that's no accident. It's the inevitable byproduct of a political strategy based on polarization. That strategy may win in the short term (indeed, it did) - but it's a long-term loser. That's because this type of strategy inevitably rallies forces against it. It's just a matter of physics - every action brings an equal and opposite reaction. In this sense, the 2008 election is simply the ripple effects of the 2002 election.

For this reason - and somewhat ironically - George W. Bush is arguably the father of the modern progressive revival. Tonight's victories -- and the infrastructure that made them possible -- would simply be unthinkable in the absence of Bush. That's not to say, of course, that the nation is better because Bush was president. It's not. But the birth of the new progressive infrastructure is the silver lining of that long eight-year cloud.

There are many thing that have confused me about Rove, but I promise you that nothing about has confused me more than his obsession with Mark Hanna. Hanna was William McKinley's Karl Rove, the man who took the Republican coalition that Lincoln built and extended it for another thirty years by ruthlessly building the first truly modern presidential campaign. For Rove the appeal of Hanna was no doubt multi-faceted, but one huge part of it surely came from the fact that only McKinley could lay claim to driving a realignment in which the party that had been dominant stayed on top.

But there's always been a problem with Rove's version of the story, a problem so big that I just cannot understand how he failed to see it. McKinley's second term was cut short by assassination, thrusting Teddy Roosevelt into the White House. And while McKinley was famously in the pocket of big business, TR was a progressive through and through. Hanna meant to build a new pro-business Republican coalition, but instead created the greatest progressive and liberal era this country has ever seen.

History may not like to repeat, but it absolutely loves to rhyme, and tonight its straight up spittin'. Just like his hero Hanna, Rove has driven a realignment, but just like Hanna its a realignment that's nothing like what he had once envisioned. He meant to take this country to the right, but instead we moved to the left. He meant to set up a new age of conservative politics, but instead he's to a new progressive age. He aimed for Hanna's hopes, and instead delivered his reality. For someone who has long declared himself a student of Hanna's history, that's really just bizarre.

There are so many things that could be said about the history of this moment, but frankly right now words are failing me. Much of what needs to be said will simply have to wait. For now, I guess I'll just stick to images.

40 years ago, Chicago played host to a divided Democratic Party, and by extension to a deeply divided nation. Although much of the drama of the 1968 convention played out in the streets of Chicago, some of the key moments unfolded inside of Grant Park.

From the beginning, one of the promises offered by Obama's campaign was that this country might finally begin to turn the page on the divisive politics that have defined the Baby Boomer years. How fitting then that his campaign would end in that very same park with, as Jonathan Alter said tonight, "everyone finally on the same side of the barricade."

Yes, America, the whole world is watching. But this time they like what they see.

When was the last time that spontaneous celebrations broke out in cities and towns across the nation when the name of the next President of the United States was announced?

I mean that seriously. Has this ever happened before?

Fouad Ajami has for many, many years been a darling of the neoconservative right. As an expert on all things Middle Eastern, he played a key role in helping establish the idea that all that region needed was a little kick start from us before it could turn into something approaching a democratic paradise. Sure thing, events have almost universally proved him wrong, but never mind that. He's still adored.

Today he takes to the pages of the Wall St. Journal to hold forth on, well... read this:

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right....

The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort....

Save in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of industry and finance. To be sure, there was a measure of willfulness in this national vision, for politics and wars guided the destiny of this republic. But that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders -- set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner.

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.

So many thing to say, so little time...

Crowds are new to American politics?

Widespread excitement and participation are a bad and dangerous thing?

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't mean what they say?

Americans are now just like the "Arab street"?

A candidate who has written two books and published dozens upon dozens of policy papers and proposals on this web site is a dangerous blank slate?

And please... Not everything in the world relates back to the mid-20th century Middle East. Obama isn't Nasser. We aren't looking for salvation or for a messiah.

For the 5,476,972nd time: This isn't about him. It is about us.

And lastly: If this system of popular participation in politics is so wrong, what precisely would you propose instead? And why if it is so bad did you so enthusiastically support a war designed to bring the system to your home lands?

But seriously... Crowds are new to American politics? Someone might want to call the entire nineteenth century and let it know.

When teaching history, one of the ideas that I always try to convey is that in America at least, our past is never really all that far away. Think slavery is ancient history? That there's just no way what happened back then could have any real impact today? Read this and you might see why.

She is 109 years old, and the daughter of a former slave. Not the granddaughter. The daughter. As in her father was a slave in the pre-Civil War South. And now she has lived long enough to vote for a black man as President of the United States.

"Ancient" history in America is not ancient. The past still touches all of us, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Republican-leaning Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

For at least a decade, Amanda Jones worked as a maid for $20 a month, Joyce Jones said. She was a housewife for 72 years and helped her now-deceased husband, C.L. Jones, manage a store.

Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year's presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children -- Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones -- helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. "I feel good about voting for him," Amanda Jones said.

Jones' father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones' father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

One of Amanda Jones' 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election's significance to the matriarch.

"It's awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us," Baker said. "It's awesome to see what she's done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work" if Obama is elected, she said.

Jones lives in a small gray house with white trim just off Texas 21. These days, a curious white kitten and a sleepy old black dog guard the house. Inside are photographs and relics of a long, full life, including a letter from then-Gov. George Bush in 1998 commemorating her 100th birthday. A black-and-white picture of her in a long flapper-style dress was taken between 1912 and 1918 -- no one can remember the exact year, Baker said with a chuckle.

Jones is part of a small percentage of active voters above the age of 100 in the state -- and the country.

Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old nun born in New Hampshire but living in Rome, made recent national headlines as the nation's oldest voter. But if Texas records are any indication, that's hard to validate.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Ashley Burton said Texas can't confirm whether Jones is the state's oldest active voter because there is too much voter information to sort through. At the county level, there are other challenges. An election official in Hays County said its records are not searchable by age, and Bastrop County elections administrator Nora Cano said that some counties automatically list voters who were born before the turn of the 20th century with birth dates of January 1900.

The oldest active voter in Travis County is 105, officials said, and in Williamson County the oldest is 106 -- making Jones the oldest-known active voter in Central Texas.

Making it to see the election results on Nov. 5 is important, but Jones is resting up for another milestone: her 110th birthday in December. "God has been good to me," she said.

Via one of my students at Tufts, Sen. John Kerry points out:

If Barack Obama is elected President, he'll serve during the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.