By James Donahue

In all the years I have observed national presidential elections . . . from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, (and I have been a reporter working in the thick of many of them most of my life) . . . I have never seen a campaign fought any harder, and a public response as large as what is going on in America today.

I noticed with strange interest early today that many of the editorial cartoonists have jumped the gun and shown Democratic candidate Barack Obama the winner, and Republican John McCain the loser of the election.

Many news reporters, and the television talking heads have been having a difficult time staying impartial in the way they slant their stories. Everybody is expecting change. Everybody is expecting a Democratic administration to take over Washington on January 20 so we can get rid of Bush, Dick Cheney and the whole raft of people who have been running the nation into the ground for eight long years.

There is a national movement going on. It is a revolution in the streets. Today the people are taking the revolution to the ballot box.

There have been times in the past when we have been disappointed when the candidate of our choice lost the election, but life continued on and we lived with the way things were done in our nation’s capital. It was not the end of the world.

This time, the alternatives could be more severe. If we don’t get change, if things are allowed to continue on the way they have been going . . . which seems to be what McCain is advocating . . . America could be in for another kind of revolution. It could be bloody. I can envision a lot of hungry, out-of-work, desperate people in the streets with guns, burning torches and even pitchforks, marching down the streets of Washington D.C.

America desperately needs to shut off the wars, to make peace with a world in desperate trouble, to join hands in a rush to solve our problems of overpopulation, loss of natural resources, pollution, global warming, food shortages and financial chaos. We need a leader who can connect with other world leaders, and work collectively to fix this mess without resorting to any further war and bloodshed.

America desperately needs to fix its decaying education system and infrastructure, get its people back to work and into their homes, open the door to national health insurance, and develop alternative sources of energy.

We need a president with the brains and the charisma of a real leader, who can make as much of this happen as possible, in spite of the obstacles created by the outgoing Bush Administration. Mr. Obama appears to fit this bill. That Bush has committed the nation to multi-trillions of dollars in national debt and left the coffers quite bare, is going to surely hamper the work.

We will remember Bush for a very long time. It will take years to fix all of the problems he has created for this nation and the world.

Hopefully we will soon see both Bush and Cheney tried for their crimes in not only the American courts, but the world courts. This action by itself would do much to heal the wounds our nation has brought down upon the rest of the world since 2001.