First morning-after thoughts:

I spent the last hour at the office yesterday - too wired and nervous to get anything else done - surfing the web, reading Election Day comments posted by voters around the country. They were overwhelmingly from Obama supporters - joyous, worried, celebratory. And over and over, voters spoke of being proud to cast their vote. People in heavily blue states like New York and Massachusetts said they voted even though they knew that in reality, their vote didn't matter, but they wanted to be part of history.

And so they were.

And so history was made.

Obama's speech last night was beautiful and in just the right tone: grateful, not gloating. And his somber approach underscored the severity of the challenges the country faces.

I was impressed, too, with McCain's concession speech. This was the person he should have been during the campaign, showing respect rather than open disdain for Obama.

You couldn't miss the contrast between McCain's Election Night gathering and Obama's, and I don't mean just the numbers: Obama's open to the public, held in a public park in the heart of one of the nation's great cities; McCain's invitation only, held at a ritzy hotel in a wealthy Phoenix suburb. McCain's supporters angry, booing the mention of Obama. Obama's supporters cheering, sobbing, hugging one another, tears streaming down the faces of Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey.

I know, I know: we react differently when we've won and when we've lost. But you also couldn't miss the contrast between McCain's heavily white crowd and Obama's wildly multi-ethnic crowd. The photographs of those 200,000 people in Chicago's Grant Park gave us a portrait of America as it is, and as it will be.

According to an NPR news report I heard this morning, Obama won in every demographic except one: people over 55. Obama is the future, McCain the past.

The Republican Party has a lot of work to do. If, as some reports have had it, Republican leaders truly believe that Sarah Palin is their future, they learned nothing in this race. For the rest of us, the Obama victory spells hope - for progress in domestic policy, in civil rights, in foreign policy, certainly. But it also spells hope not because of anything Obama himself will do, but because his majority win indicates how much the country has begun to change.

Among many pieces of good news from this election: Perhaps negative campaign doesn't work, after all. During the last two McCain-Obama debates, I was fascinated by those little bars that CNN scrolled along the bottom of the screen, showing the real-time reaction of a focus group of undecided voters. They hated the candidates' attacks on each other.

That, I figured, was a good sign.

And yesterday, Elizabeth Dole lost to a relative unknown, due in large part, apparently, to Dole's "Godless" attack ad.