I'm still digesting this. My feeling, a little irrational but, I find, shared by many of my friends, is that the grown-ups are back in charge. The frat boys aren't running wild anymore. People with not just brains and consciences but a certain amount of heft are at the wheel.

I loved two things: one, reported by David Gergen on CNN, was that campaign staffers understand they're hired for the length of the campaign. On election night, it's over, win or lose. You pack up your stuff and start looking for another job. Not this campaign, though. Apparently the staffers are being paid through the end of the month and will have health insurance through the end of the year. According to Gergen, this is unprecedented -- except by Barack Obama's Senate campaign, when he did the same thing. I may be wrong, but it seems to me this is basic goodness rearing its head.

The second thing I loved was that, the day after being elected President of the United States, after a 21-month, massive, history-making campaign, Obama got up and -- went to the gym. This is a guy with his head on straight. I say that not just as a gym rat. (Though as a basketball player, I think I'm permitted a little beam of pride here; he played basketball with his staff while they waited for the returns. I wonder if he needs a short speech-writing point guard?) But it seems this President knows that, as different as things can seem, one day is really like another; things follow other things; life has a center and the center can, in fact, hold. The guy who went to the gym Wednesday morning is the same guy who took two days in the last week of the campaign to go see his dying grandmother. And that's my kind of guy.