Once again, President Obama proves that courage is “cool.”

Sometimes courage is thrust upon you, but how you handle it speaks volumes about your character.

President Obama embraced full Gay and Lesbian marital equality, a controversial issue during a tough reelection fight, by simply saying that it was the right thing to do.

Once again, President Obama proves that courage is “cool.”

Being first comes with all sorts of political headaches.  The passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson probably wrecked the Democratic Party in the Deep South, but we became a better nation for it.  Dismantling “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” might harm President Obama with some members of the military, but we will have a better military with it.

Answer “The Big Question” and you may win this rare “Harry Truman” button from the 1949 Inaugural. Scroll down for details.

Finally, allowing Gays and Lesbians to love and marry, as God made them, may harm the President with some culturally conservative Democrats and independents in tight state contests, but we’ll become an even better nation for that too.

What makes me most proud to be an American is that with each step, we validate the aims of our “Gospel of our Democracy,” found within The Declaration of Independence.  We might be slow at times, but the footpath of Civil Rights only leads in one direction.  Perhaps the Founding Fathers might not have imagined the 2012 version of “equality,” but the notion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is timeless and resolute.  It took a century after Lincoln’s poetry at Gettysburg for full citizenship to become statutory prose, but within two generations after Lyndon Johnson’s pen, an African American was elected President in a landslide.

Why is that?

Go West Young Liberal/The Emerging Landscape

Somewhere, Gary Hart is smiling.

For the past four decades, the former Colorado Senator and two-time Presidential candidate made the case—to anybody who would listen—that the prospects for long-term Democratic salvation were better found west of the Mississippi rather than south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Like many who first spot a trend, Hart’s theory was, at first, roundly dismissed.  Conventional wisdom held that a moderate Southerner, who could appeal to Northeastern liberals and Industrial Midwest labor, would pick off just enough Border States to squeak into the White House.

History was on their side; Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were either Southerners or came from Border States.  The only exception was John Kennedy.

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Back then, any thought of Democrats winning the West seemed hopeless.  Between 1948 and 1992 (the exception being Johnson’s landslide in 1964) most western remained safely Republican, which gave them a 150 of the 270 electoral votes they needed to win in November. People forget that Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George HW Bush all won California; in 1984, it was Ronald Reagan’s most successful state and he beat Mondale by more than 1.5 million votes.

So what happened?