Letter: Next four years should be exciting

In a few days the president-elect will be sworn in, climaxing the most bizarre election cycle the country has seen in a century or more.

The primaries produced two flawed candidates - one coming out of a populist uprising and the other hand-picked by party pooh-bahs. The subsequent campaign was raucous, laced with name-calling and insults. Civility, facts and truth fell by the wayside. The competing visions of the candidates stood in stark contrast. One offered a continuation/extension of the Obama years, while the other proposed walling off the country into isolationism.

The electorate surprised politicians, pundits, and pollsters by rejecting the 'more Obama” option in favor of the radical, albeit ill-defined alternative. A glance of the county-by-county voting results on a map of the country shows how angry the voters had become. Apart from the western and northeastern coastal regions the map is a sea of red dotted with occasional islands of blue (in predictable places).

So the country has a president-elect who is impulsive by nature, has no governing experience, has caused foreign policy angst, does not need (he says) security briefings and does communication in tweet storms. Stay tuned, it may be an exciting ride!

Perhaps the best result of this election has been that Harry Reid is gone and that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are relegated to the backbench.

Norbert B. Hemesath

Cedar Rapids