Last night when I was driving home, I only hoped there would be a fresh episode of The Office waiting to greet my eyes. Little did I know I would be watching a historic night in politics.

It was four years ago last night that my brief interest in politics was extinguished by the living wet towel, John Kerry. The earlier part of the decade had been spent stomping around office parks in my blazer and hitting "submit" on Monster.com sending literally hundreds, if not over a thousand, resumes, looking for a job in the economic recession to no avail. Add to that that now people were coming home from the Middle East without their limbs, and we didn't even have a clearly-stated reason for being there. Howard Dean seemed to be the sole guy holding a torch lighting the way out. I went to Howard Dean's "meet ups" and even wrote a few postcards to Iowa caucus voters telling them to please support Dean.

After having a 20% lead in every poll, Howard Dean got blown out of the water in the Iowa caucuses by John Kerry, who's campaign had been prnounced DOA by everyone down to Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog from the Conan O'Brien show. So it seemed that to be a presidential candidate you had to have a lineage that could be traced to the British royal family, a Skull 'n' Bones Yalie with money shooting out of your ass. The land of opportunity was nothing but a hoax and we were just inmates on a corporate feudal plantation run by the same old boss.

Then came January 3, 2008. The contest: Mitt "Mittens" Romney, a corporate raider type known for buying retail operations (Staples, Sports Authority, Guitar Center) and firing the workforce down to the bare minimum, running whoever was left ragged to show a high revenue-per-worker ratio, then selling the business off before it ultimately failed, anyhow. On the other side, Hillary Clinton, the wife of one of the Democrats' favorite presidents ever, an ultimate party insider who promised to bring the Chosen One (that's Bill) back to the White House to restore a 1998 Utopia.

Like Howard Dean, they were both thoroughly stomped in the dirt, Romney by a former Baptist preacher from a poor state, and Hillary by a racially-mixed smoker from Illinois. It is said Mitt Romney outspent Mike Huckabee 15:1 for his loss, while Hillary had raised far and away the most money from her Beltway insider friends for the Democrats.

No, I wouldn't vote for a Republican, but I find myself thrilled to see a Huckabee victory, anyhow, just as I'm happy for Obama's victory (though I was kinda counting on a Clinton win). Anytime the status quo gets upset I like it, and it's genuinely a relief to find out you can't just buy a presidency. As John Edwards said last night, "It's an election, not an auction." Maybe the presidential race is really more like American Idol: all the candidates can sing, but it's about the "X" factor, and either you got it or you don't.

I'm pretty happy, aren't you?

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