If not, it sure has felt like it.

I started to get really interested in politics after the 2000 election. That election, it’s results, and the way divided Americans really got me fired up to make sure I did what I could to see it never happened again. I didn’t go out and curse Bush after he was announced the winner by a divided Supreme Court like some may have, I accepted what had happened and decided not to turn my frustrations on Bush, but focus them on the next election.

In the months after Bush became President – and I’ve said this many times over the years – I really gave him a chance to be a good President and made an honest effort to let him serve some time before I made up my mind about him. While he wasn’t my choice for President, he was the President none the less, so I gave him the chance to be a good President silently hoping he’d change my mind through his actions. I have a great amount of respect for the Presidency and afforded a similar amount of respect to President Bush in his early months.

After his first few months in office, it became apparent that Bush was going to use his time as President not only to radically alter American foreign and domestic policy, but to do so in a way that suggested that he really didn’t care what people thought anyways. This, despite that fact that a majority of American voters had cast their ballots for his opponent, not him. He ruled as though he had a mandate from the American people, although just the opposite was true.

And that’s when I stopped having faith that our new President was one I could be happy with.

Then came 9/11 and many people, myself included, rallied around the President in the days and months that followed. There was a new optimism despite the tragedy, as we had the full support and backing of every country on Earth to fight the new ‘war on terror’. It seemed that the world had never been so united in a common cause, and never was it squandered so quickly.

The Bush administration thumbed it’s nose at the rest of the world, and preceded to forge ahead with it’s “Go It Alone & US vs. Them” strategy, brushing away the extended hands and arms of organizations and countries who wanted to help us. We weren’t bound by the laws of the International Courts, the Kyoto Treaty, or the advice of the UN Security council. It was our way or the Highway, “if you’re not with us you’re against us”, “Old Europe vs. New Europe”, and within months the unique world wide support we’d once enjoyed was quickly turning to disdain.

This unilateral attitude carried us into Iraq, which despite the grand speechs that told us to expect a quick Shock & Awe war, that we’d then win the Hearts & Minds of the Iraqi people, who would enjoy the Safety and Prosperity we brought, while the liberated children of Baghdad smiled and threw flowers as the tanks rolled into town; victorious and massive, their treads symbolically crushing the guns of Saddam’s Republican Guard.

In the weeks that turned into months after the War, we waited for the promises of those speeches to be fulfilled, and have instead been greeted with a truth that the rationals for war were not quite true, even if they weren’t quite lies, that our troops continued to die in what would prove to be an increasing rate, and that the towns and cities we promised to secure quickly became anything but, even for American troops. Now over 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, 1,100 US troops have died, civilians are being beheaded on satellite TV on a near weekly basis, and Westerns dare not come out of their protected Green Zone.

All the while, the grand speechs of the Bush administration keep telling us that things are getting better. Then that once the Iraq people are in charge of their own sovereign nation things will be more secure. Now just wait till the elections in January and things will get better and be more secure. And all the while, our troops and innocent people continue to die.

Of course, the Iraq War is just one failure that I believe this administration knowingly led us into.

You can look here at home and see multi-national corporations getting tax cuts to ship jobs overseas, over a million Americans who’ve lost their jobs in the last 4 years, increasing health care, a huge deficit, an environmental policy more in the hands of those who pollute it than those who are charged with protecting it… The list goes on and on and on.

In the past twenty four months, it’s become especially clear to me that this country seriously needs change, and that I would do what I could to help bring that change about. And for many of those twenty four months, I’ve been writing here on my weblog and talking with friends and family about the 2004 election, and how we had to get someone new in the White House.

At first it looked like it might have been Howard Dean, then John Edwards, but the Democrats finally settled on John Kerry as their choice to be GWB’s opponent. A lot of people over the course of the past Spring and Summer thought he was a terrible choice to run against a President who was riding 65% approval ratings at the time. Indeed, there was a period of time when you were considered foolish to throw your hat into the Democratic nomination ring because GWB was all but unbeatable.

But slowly and surely and despite having both houses of Congress under his control, the promises of those grand speechs have never arrived, and the American people took notice. Bush has had his chance to turn things around in this country, and it hasn’t happened.

So here we are today, Nov. 2, when American’s will either re-elect GWB or elect John Kerry as President, and man has it been a long ass election cycle.

Thankfully, one that is now all but finished. It’s been a long long time that I have been talking about this election, with friends, family, and here on my weblog, and to be honest, now that the day is actually here, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet.

Today is the day I’ve been looking forward to for almost four years, and it’s very exciting. So exciting in fact – and this probably sounds crazy – that I had trouble sleeping last night as my mind raced with anticipation, electoral vote counts, and visions of hanging chads dancing in my head.

I really feel that John Kerry and John Edwards are going to defeat Bush/Cheney today. We just seem to have the momentum on our side. Much of it I’m sure, the kind that’s been building for four years in other Democrats as well. I honestly think that Bush/Cheney have had their chance to make things better, and for many people, it hasn’t happened yet.

All you really have to do is ask yourself, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?”.

So for the rest of the night I’ll be glued to the TV, watching the returns, and posting here.

Regardless of who wins, it’s been an exciting election cycle. If things are fair and square, I hope people can agree to respect the Presidency and the person who holds it, no matter what their party affiliation might be. Hopefully over the next four years, we can become closer with fellow citizens, instead of increasingly divided.

I’ll probably be posting a few entries over the course of the day about the election, but just a quick note about what Jenny and I saw in the polling place this morning when we voted (to break the suspense, we voted for Kerry/Edwards).

There were what seemed like a lot of new unregistered voters showing up, documents and ID’s in hand, to cast what was obviously their first ballot. One guy in particular, a little younger than us, had a stack of papers in his hand and calmly answered the poll workers questions. He was obviously very serious about being able to vote today, and seemed to really want to make some sort of statement with his vote.

For which side, of course, we don’t know, but the good thing is seeing a citizen eager to participate in the democratic process. No matter which side of that process you’re on, it’s heartening to see other American’s taking such an active interest in the future direction of their country.