“To give victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.”— Abraham Lincoln.

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my politics and my faith. I feel very good today.

A couple of minutes after CNN and the networks named Joe Biden the winner, my daughter Emma texted me the above photo of Robin, my granddaughter, who was out in the streets celebrating the end of the Trump Era.

Outside, Brooklyn, the heart of New America, was going nuts. Robin demanded to join the party. Package delivery drivers were driving through the streets in a caravan, honking horns.

There was a sense of being liberated in many big cities in America. There was a sense of quiet in my rural town in upstate New York. There was no cheering here, almost everyone in my county voted for Donald Trump.

On our country, one person’s sadness is another’s joy.

An 89-year-old woman said in an e-mail that she remembered this same feeling when she saw the first American tank rumbling into Berlin in 1945. “I’ve never seen people dancing in the streets like this,” she said, she lives in Boston. “I wish I could, I remember the young men in  Germany,  marching with torches and shouting threats to the Jews,” she said.

Democracy and the people who believe in it are jubilant, perhaps the first chance for many of you to feel that way in a long time.

It is a moment worth savoring. I felt younger and lighter.

Trump’s meanness of spirit and his cruelty soaked into the heart and very fabric of America. It infected many of his followers, worst of all.  It corrupted a once great political party.

It horrified and frightened the world.

It was never possible for him to give the people who loved him what he promised.

Today, for all of its continuing troubles, I feel we began the road to getting our soul back.

Remember to take some deep breaths, have a drink, and give thanks to the people who held our democracy together these past few days and perhaps saved it: the poll workers, police, Republican and Democratic voting officials and governors, the Secretaries of State, the media and reporters, which fought hand-to-hand for truth and facts and the many millions of people who stood out in the heat and cold and rain for hours to vote.

I am also grateful for the many Republicans who voted peacefully and responsibly and who accepted the results. They helped save our democracy as well.

Biden, one of the least exciting political figures in America, got more votes than any other president in American history. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret that.

Trump and Biden have one thing in common. They triumphed over a talented field of rivals, which absolutely no one expected or predicted.

A lot of the people who voted for Trump love him for many different reasons. A lot of the people who voted for  Trump did so because they hate the rest of us. That would be a good thing to think about, even on this well deserved day of joy.

The pandemic appears to be roaring back, and that will drain so much of the joy of Biden’s victory. I’m guessing it is true that the new administration will attack the coronavirus more directly and honestly. And hopefully, soon.

I don’t think the American idea works well when the urban and educated and prosperous are on one side, and so many struggling working men and women are on the other, even if we can’t understand them.

That doesn’t have to be. It can change. Biden gives me hope that it will. I have this fantasy of a Rural Reclamation project bringing new jobs, new schools, health care centers, job re-training programs, small business loans, broadband, and many infrastructures to rural, as well as urban, American.

What we were all afraid of was, “would the center hold?” Would the civic structure that has held America together for years be strong enough to stand up to the Trump onslaught.

It has held and will have to hold some more. But the big news is that the center has held. We are stronger than we knew.

There was this feeling among people who care for other people that we were dancing at the edge of the precipice and were just a few steps away from falling over and into the abyss.

That was a hard thing to go through.

Donald Trump has turned into a malignant tumor spreading rapidly through the vital organs of our democracy. This week, the people cut him out. Like most malignancies, he will die hard. Grace is not his primary characteristic.

Like all demagogues, he was good mostly at promoting hate and disrupting order. When it came to governing, he was a disaster. We will be cleaning up his messes for years.

This afternoon, he fled to his golf course in Virginia to hide from failure; it is said he can’t bear to hear the cheers outside of the White House windows.

And you can bet he won’t call Biden up to congratulate him. Grace is not one of his strong points.

Hail Trump, the Trump Era is over.

Two things stand out. Joe Biden has made it clear that he is a listener, not a bully, or a demagogue. If our democracy stands for anything right now, it is about listening to the half of the country that is so unhappy.

A few days in Kentucky or central Ohio wouldn’t hurt.

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” Lincoln asked.

My heart goes out to the people who felt so much fear and anger over these past few years. I don’t know of any politician in my lifetime who was as hateful as he chose to be.

Trump’s followers were loyal, but few of them struck me as happy. The Republicans remind me of the terrified POW’s in World War II movies.

And I believe every one of them was exploited. He didn’t deliver.

America went off the rails these past few years; our government has become detached from the people it was elected to serve.

Fixing that is a tall order. My heart also goes out to the millions of people who feel today what so many people felt in 2016 and felt until early this afternoon.

America has rejected both the far left and the far right both at the same time. It has also – and despite the many Republican successes – soundly and convincing rejected the cruelty, greed, and incompetence of the Trump era.

The hidden genius of a democracy like ours is that it always seeks balance and checks power whenever it can. People can be strange, but they can also be wise.

In an odd way, this is an election that almost everyone seemed to win, that could be healthy in and of itself. The biggest loser by far was Donald Trump.

In supporting so many Republicans and electing Biden with such overwhelming numbers, the country seems divided but has also been brought into balance.

Biden will have the power to stop or reverse many of Donald Trump’s worst excesses, but he will have to negotiate and work with the opposition. The far left and the far right will automatically be weakened and pushed to the sides.

Trump turned extremist, his most fundamental mistake.  America loves the middle. But Biden, a centrist and negotiator, is very different from Trump.

I feel this strongly. I am a creature of the middle, and most Americans are citizens of the middle. I think the election saved the middle as well as democracy itself.

Many Americans argue that they haven’t been listened to – women, gays, Hispanics, Asians, Native-Americans, and now, most of the white working class.

A nation of grievances.

Our leaders pick up the phone instantly when the lobbyists call, but the working people of the country, blue and red, can never seem to get through.

These people have heard politicians promise to listen to them for decades; few of them believe it is possible. We’ll see.

I am wary of the pundits who tell me what will happen next. Nobody knows; the future is not knowable. But today was just fine.

The irony of the Trump Era is that the President sold himself as the working man’s hero, brave populist fighting the elites, even as he flooded the swamp with cronies, crooks, and fellow billionaires.

One day, if Joe Biden does his job, the real people will see that Trump is not the solution; he is the problem.

Joe Biden is a warm-hearted schmoozer and old-style political hack. You know, the guys who have drunk with each other and get things done. People say they want normalcy and decency. That’s Biden.

Many people in Washington will be a lot more comfortable talking to Biden than Barack Obama or Donald Trump.

It might just be they are willing to deal with him and get some things done.

More than anything, that would get the country moving on the road to recovery. People with nothing have nothing to lose.

Biden, one of the least flashy and charismatic presidential candidates in my lifetime, turned out to be what we most wanted and most needed.

I’ve enjoyed returning to my political writing, and I mean to keep it going. Thanks for coming along. Stay calm. Be strong. Much love and compassion to you.

And congratulations.