hurray for the good guys, by which i mean the less-bad guys. like much of the country, if you believe the pundits' spin on the exit polls, what this guy wanted was for america to dtmfa. not that i believe that the democrats have a better agenda. maybe secretly they do (universal health care, anyone?), but they certainly lack the cojones to enunciate what's in their hearts with any specificity.
no, the reason this is good news is because america, like capitalism, works by not working. we've seen from the disasters of the last six years what one-party rule does for the country. without the check of an opposition (or oppositions) with real power, ideology trumps practicality, and shit stops working. america is, first and foremost, a framework for settling arguments, a set of rules by which competing factions that don't agree can split the difference and find a working solution.
checks and balances. they don't call it the golden mean for nothing.
this is one reason i've always had a bit more sympathy for democrats than republicans, even though classic conservatism (the old school variety) usually has a stronger intellectual argument. the democrats (minus the radical lefties, who are cute and funny), despite their many failings, are willing to hear other points of view, especially from each other, and even occasionally have been known to change their minds.
another upshot of the election, i hope, is the end of base politics in general, and republican base politics in particular. extremists aren't very good at working through differences and making compromises; they kind of need absolute power so as to carry out their agenda without adulteration or dilution of any sort, and we all know how well that works out.
so, anyway, hurray for america. the system works (sort of, anyway, enough to correct itself every now and again).