By pure coincidence, I happened to be in my old Los Angeles neighborhood on Election Day, and like many others, I found the extraordinary power of that day difficult to articulate. At the polling places in which I'd often voted, but had never waited in line, there were lines around the block. Friends who had voted regularly with no more than a mild sense of civic duty now spoke of participating in a moment that - whether they themselves had voted for Obama or McCain - they'd long remember and would tell their grandchildren about. For me, the tears that flowed in Chicago's Grant Park that night were beyond moving. One need neither forgive nor forget Jesse Jackson's abhorrent comments about Jews and Israel to ...