Well, that was something, wasn’t it? Now we know what “peak schadenfreude” feels like.

There are those who say – and the president-elect, to his credit, was first among them – that this is the time to bring us together and to begin immediately to address the great problems that confront us.

Donald Trump was, of course, correct, and his call was echoed later in the day by both President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Nonetheless, it’s hard to move forward without understanding the implications of Tuesday’s vote.

Here are a few of them:

• Like Al Gore in 2000, Clinton seems to have won the popular vote. Look for assaults on the Electoral College to resume if that’s the case.

• Still, the Clinton era is over. Their hundreds of millions will cushion the blow, but now they have no influence with government and thus no favors to grant. So they’d better invest wisely for their declining years – which began Tuesday.

• The Obama era is also over. The lame-duck president will probably do what damage he can for the next two months, but his legacy will be measured by how many of his plans and programs come to a screeching halt.

Among them, we can expect, will be Obamacare, which was an ideal plan for a socialist welfare state (and apparently intended only as a step toward it). Now we have a chance – and Speaker Paul Ryan promised Wednesday to provide it – to repeal and replace it with a system that offers people affordable choices and real control over their own well-being. That is, a system appropriate to a free people who are not mere wards of the welfare state.

• We have elected a friend of Israel and a supporter of the Second Amendment, both of which are good. We also can hope he will provide a corruption-free Department of Justice, FBI and Internal Revenue Service, which would be a welcome change.

Add to that the demise of the whole “climate change” regime. Trump promised to repudiate the (never-ratified-by-Congress) Paris climate accord calling for $100 billion in transfers to other nations and to cut off all funds this nation sends to the United Nations to “fight global warming.” About time.

Add also a reversal of the ruinous decline in the strength and morale of our armed forces, which have for too long been the target of progressive social experimentation. The military exists solely to fight and win wars (wars that weakness invites and strength helps avoid), and we need to realize that.

Illegal immigration will be addressed, presumably not with mass deportations but also without mass amnesty. Border control is the place to start, along with expelling criminal aliens and making those expulsions stick. And we may be seeing that not all Latinos vote as a bloc. Some surveys show that long-term citizens see uncontrolled immigration as harmful to Latino interests, just like other groups – which may have shown up in the Florida vote.

Indeed, CNN reported Wednesday that Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among both black and Latino voters.

Also, the prospect for a Supreme Court that respects both the Constitution and the rights and interests of the American people – and perhaps even those of unborn babies – has greatly brightened.

While critics have rightly belabored Congress for not standing up to Obama’s autocratic impulses, holding up his nomination to the court of the stealth left-winger Merrick Garland was a triumph for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Now the new president will have majorities in both houses of Congress, while Republicans continue to dominate in governors’ mansions and statehouses around the country. Halting infighting and working with willing Democrats and independents is critically important at all those levels.

• Pollsters have a lot of explaining to do. While a few surveys, including daily tracking polls such as the Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll and the one by the Los Angeles Times/USC, regularly showed Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton, most did not.

Indeed, the latter poll was actually excluded by the folks who aggregate polls to provide the rolling averages of multiple surveys that many news outlets relied on. Averages can also conceal critical shifts in opinion by melding newer surveys into previous polls. On Tuesday, we saw where that ends up.

• Let’s be proud of Maine’s 2nd District. Not only did its voters make history by contributing its electoral vote to Trump’s margin, but it returned Bruce Poliquin to Congress as a member of the majority who can work for the state effectively in Washington.

(Meanwhile, 1st District voters re-elected Chellie Pingree.)

• Finally, holding true to their heritage of freedom, Mainers defeated Question 3’s infringement on our firearms-related civil liberties, rejecting its out-of-state financial supporters’ fear-mongering campaign.

Good show, folks. Good show.

M.D. Harmon, a retired journalist and military officer, is a free-lance writer and speaker. He can be contacted at:

mdharmoncol@yahoo.com

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