Great piece by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Can John Kerry Cure Cancer?”

There will not be a great parting of the clouds.

There will not be brighter flowers and happier puppies. There will not be massive choruses of angels singing and birds chirping and dolphins finally standing upright and speaking fluent Latin and saying we knew it all along. …

But here’s the thing: Given how this is pretty much the most important election in your lifetime, given how much is at stake and how deeply BushCo has rammed us down the bleak hole of fear and war and environmental gluttony and abuse, a “regular” president is a blessing we can only dream of.

And the presidential debates have shown Kerry to be a formidable intellect, forthright and fluent and the absolute antithesis of Bush’s fast-blinking aww-shucks dumb-guy smarminess. You know, like a normal president should. And the bottom line is this: never has normal looked so good.

Because this is the point in history where we say, oh my freaking God we never knew how good we had it. Sure we all knew the Clinton era was something special and even Bush 1.0 was tolerable and relatively benign and gutless, but oh my God, we had to suffer the appalling, warmongering neofascism of Bush 2.0 to really appreciate what America was, and what we should try to be again.