Obama reelected!

Obama wins!  Hooray and whew!

I’m listening to his acceptance speech translated in Italian with a voice-over.  I can hear him in the background, along with the crowd.  He says he has never loved Michelle more, never respected her more for being a favorite of so many Americans.  Without meaning to be at all cynical, he must know how that helped his reelection.

I can hear him affirming how much work still needs to be done, that he will try to find consensus on new proposals, and will work in a spirit of compromise.  Not too much, I hope.  He must have learned something from trying to work with Republicans these last four years.  I’m encouraged in that when he says that he won’t be operating with blind optimism, that he knows the difficulty of the challenges.  As an aside, from what I can tell, the translator on RAI 1 is doing an excellent job.

I switch to France Inter for a moment, hear some of the same speech, this time translated into French.  He seems “more determined than ever,” according to the French commentator.  Here’s hoping.

These radio broadcasts add to how I’ve been struck by the extent of coverage in the papers and on the radio (haven’t had time to watch TV) that the U.S. election received here, and not just on election day.  It’s been building up for most of the last week; multi-page sections on the campaign and ad spots for radio, TV, and the internet promising full coverage of the returns, most of which would start at midnight last night.  Given how heavily our policies can weigh on the rest of the world, there ought to be a way they could vote in our elections.
 
Listening to these reports, I feel like I've refound my interest in the world.  It's safe (more or less) to go into the water again.  Fearing the worst, I hadn’t been able to read anything about the election.  Pretty much everything I’ve heard for the last week or more has been thanks to Lynda.  Now, I feel like I can go back to reading TPM and the rest.  There’s at least the possibility of new public action and the hope that Obama is ready to put the Republicans to the test.  In fact, why not a strategy that forces them into the open over and over and sets the stage for the House election in 2014?

Below are this morning’s headlines from two of Italy's major papers.  I bought both thinking I wanted to read about the results before I realized that both were put to bed before anyone knew the results.  There's an interesting contrast in the headlines.  Corriere declares only “A Test in Key States.”  La Repubblica, though, seems sly in a headline that says, “White House, America has Chosen.”  And below there's a (composite?) photo with a young woman posing with a cutout Obama figure.  Were the headline and photo added at the last possible moment?  Did they mean the photo to suggest the result, even though none of the articles does more than report on the last campaign statements and election day turnout?