November 9, 2008, 05:34 PM ET

Election 2008: A View From West Point

I spent a couple days at West Point recently, guest-lecturing and visiting with some Army officers on the faculty who teach the introductory American politics course, which is required of all cadets. I quickly learned that they spend a lot more time in class stressing the importance of civilian control of the military than I do in my own intro course at Rhodes. Only much later did it occur to me that one of the reasons I and other professors at civilian colleges can pass over this subject lightly is that the West Point faculty do not.

What a luxury to live in a country where it doesn’t matter which candidate Army officers prefer because they will accept the results of the election no matter how it turns out. Did anyone one wake up last Tuesday wondering whether the Republicans would yield power if the Democrats won? Will anyone — even the most rabid haters of President Bush and Vice President Cheney — wake up on January 20, 2009, wondering whether they will call out the tanks to prevent President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden from taking the oath of office?

Less than a month after Obama becomes president, the United States will mark the 200th birthday of that other Illinois president, Abraham Lincoln. (Note to Obama: Please don’t do what Lincoln did after his election: grow a beard.) If any president ever had a good excuse to call off an election, it was Lincoln. But, Civil War or no, elections went ahead as scheduled throughout his term, even in 1864, when Lincoln expected to lose to a Democrat pledged to undo most of his war aims.

This is an election to celebrate not just for the visible reason — our first black president — but also for an invisible one: the sleep no American has to lose worrying whether the Army will allow him to take power.