I was very happy to see President Obama win a second term last night. For starters it was gratifying that despite all sorts of last minute challenges this was not a close vote with hanging chads and damage to the integrity of the democratic process.  It was also a compelling repudiation of candidates with backward positions on issues such as abortion and women’s rights more generally.

But there are important issues on which I have have deeply disagreed with the approach taken by the Obama administration. Most important among those are the continued rolling back of civil liberties in the name of the war on terror.  With a stronger position for Obama all around (including the Senate) I am hoping that maybe Obama can deliver on some of his promises of change from the 2008 election.  Cory Doctorow summed up my feeling perfectly with this tweet.

I am also concerned that President Obama’s approach to the jobs crisis in the US is not yet sufficiently creative and have been writing about that as well.  I hope that in a second term we can see more interesting programs here as well, especially ones that tie in better with protecting the environment (more on that in upcoming posts).

One of the reasons why I am hopeful for the second term is that maybe the Republican party can return to a saner approach to politics and rid itself of its extreme elements.  Chris Sacca succinctly made this point with his terrific election night tweet: “Most Republicans I know are high-integrity, thoughtful, patriotic, moderate Americans. I hope they get to take their party back.” And maybe, just maybe we can move more politicians past the traditional Democratic and Republican agendas (as Sergey Brin is hoping for) and towards a Peer Progressive agenda instead.