For America, a new chapter unfolds

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November 5, 2008

Anonymous The Tribune-Democrat Wed Nov 05, 2008, 03:22 PM EST

America’s history books opened to a new and hopefully proud chapter on Tuesday when our country elected its first black president.

Although the decision was a decisive one, it won’t be easily accepted by some people, and that’s unfortunate.

We pray for Barack Obama, who in January will become the 44th chief executive of these United States. He perhaps faces greater challenges than any president before him: Two wars abroad and a seriously distressed economy at home and around the world.

He also must tend to a nation’s wounds, left by a bitterly fought, two-year presidential campaign.

President Kennedy, during a nationally televised interview after two years in office, was asked to describe how the job had measured up to his expectations.

His answer: “The problems are more difficult than I had imagined they were. ... It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments.”

Two years of speech-making are over for Senator Obama. He has promised change and hope and a better America. It will soon be time to produce, but he can’t do it alone – obviously. He’ll need the help of all of us.

Here in our region, we have renewed for two more years the mandates of U.S. Reps. John Murtha and Bill Shuster and for four years that of state Sen. John Wozniak. That doesn’t mean they can rest on their laurels; there is much to be done.

We hope they learned much during this campaign from their opponents and their constituents.

For Mr. Murtha, the campaign was an eye-opener, and at the age of 76, we hope an educational experience. He must be ever more conscious to think before speaking. His ill-advised words about racism and rednecks, combined with his too-quick comments about Marines charged in slayings in Haditha, Iraq, left him in a fight for his political life.

A loss for the now 18-term congressman could have been a disastrous blow for a region finally showing an economic rebirth after decades of struggle.

We have chosen three new leaders to represent our area in the state House, Carl Metzgar, Bryan Barbin and Frank Burns. We wish them well while cautioning them to remember their campaign promises to work hard toward a smaller and more open government, and one which spends less.

We expect them to guard over our tax dollars to make sure they are spent wisely, and we look forward to them being a unified voice working for the betterment of Cambria and Somerset counties and for the entire state.

We’ll be watching you.

To our readers, it has been an exhausting period for you, too. Perhaps at no other time in history have the voters been so educated, so vocal, so passionate (in some cases perhaps too passionate!).

You witnessed campaign debates on TV and in our local schools. You read newspapers and magazines, watched TV news and searched the Internet to learn more about the candidates. You wrote what might have been a record number of letters to our Readers’ Forum about an election.

You did your homework.

Now it’s time for everyone to come together and accept those who have been elected by the majority.

Let’s give them time to make positive changes. Let’s give them our support.

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