How the Republicans blew it: for the last eight years, the Republicans have rivaled the Democrats in making government bigger, costlier, and more intrusive. Now they have paid the price.(ELECTIONS)

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For Republicans, it might have been a good night to watch Casablanca. John and Cindy McCain are not Bogart and Bergman, but they made a handsome couple facing a grim reality in what must be the American war hero and Arizona senator's "last hurrah."

For Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats, it was an ascent to dizzying heights made possible by the long, painful, and sometimes fatal struggles of many who did not live to see the day when America elected a black man to the nation's highest executive office. The trappings, the functions, and the legitimate powers of the office will be the same. A new and different kind of occupant has already made significant history. As President John E Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address: "We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom--symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change." Whether we will have as much freedom to celebrate at the end of the Obama presidency as we do at its beginning is an outcome to be hoped for and a result to be awaited.

There is no question that freedom has been under siege for the past eight years under the Bush-Cheney reign. Domestic spying, monitoring private international communications without warrant, running secret prisons, sanctioning and even "outsourcing" torture, while denying the privilege of habeas corpus, even in some cases to American citizens arrested on American soil, are all part of the ugly heritage that will be the Bush legacy. How many of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, eroded by usurpation and abandoned by neglect, Obama will either attempt to rescue or abandon in a "spirit of bipartisanship" remains to be seen.

"Each age is a dream that is dying," wrote an Irish poet long ago, "Or one that is coming to birth." Those of us who attended the wildly premature but nonetheless exciting Goldwater Victory Rally at New York's Madison Square Garden in October of 1964 have often looked back fondly on the days when the seeds of the "Reagan Revolution" were planted in the ashes of Goldwater's defeat.

Largely forgotten in the election-night celebrations was the cagey architect of the 1964 Goldwater defeat, President Lyndon B. Johnson. When he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ...