Change is here — and that's refreshing

We should glean from the photo-op two days after the election that all's well in Washington.

The president and the future speaker of the House looked relaxed and amiable. They made obligatory statements of bipartisan cooperation; they shook hands and smiled.

The news reports told us they had broken bread together that morning and had talked of the work that lies ahead. I think that after the political bickering of the past few years, most of the country released the tension in their shoulders and took a deep breath. I think we all needed a timeout, and I think we'll get one for a couple of months at least.

Shakespeare would have done it differently. He knew the value of showing his characters sharing a meal. When people sit together to eat in Shakespeare's universe, it means something. It means there is a bond of some sort, that they have something in common — enmity, love, resolve, blood.

The White House press office arranged that day's media availability with the proper protocol but no imagination. I would liked to have seen the president and the future speaker talking between mouthfuls, over the clinking of silverware on china. I would liked to have heard the unprepared remarks. We'll have to deduce what happened over lunch by how the politics unfold.

Already there has been a change at the Pentagon. The most benign euphemism calls it a fresh point of view. With Donald Rumsfeld gone, there is the appearance of room to maneuver a solution in Iraq.

It's a complicated scenario. On the one hand, there is new leadership in Congress and a new leader in the Department of Defense. On the other, there is a seemingly untenable condition on the ground in Iraq.

And there is the president, who has voiced the willingness to work with the opposition. It would be a fitting twist if Bush's last two years in office were to be marked by a sense of unity, more so than when his own party controlled Congress.

There is, in the aftermath of the election, a tendency on the part of the media and pundits to dissect the vote and study the electorate. Unity will have to wait until we get through divvying the country by politics of interest and identity.

Already the exit polls have uncovered the differences between the votes of women and the votes of men, the unmarried versus the married, the young against the old, red states against blue states.

It was a tight race. In the end, the Democrats prevailed, which is why election minutiae matters. We aren't simply red and blue.

Within days of the election, the preliminary stats of the Latino vote in Texas popped up in my e-mail. According to the William C. Velasquez Institute, Texas Latinos favored the Democratic Party by 63 percent — almost twice as much as they favored the Republicans.

Forty percent gave their vote to gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell, 14 percent to Gov. Rick Perry. And they favored Kinky Friedman over Perry by a fraction of a percentage point. But they also favored Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison by almost 54 percent. Texas Latinos were, to quote the news release, "all over the map: Democratic for Congress, Republican for Senate, and split for Governor."

The initial reading of the Latino vote in Texas holds that the traditional strength and organization of political parties and operatives crumbled and voters were left to discern for themselves through the media. In other words, things aren't what they used to be. I'd like to think of it as political maturity.

We haven't been privy to the conversations over dinner in Latino households, but we're getting a clear picture of what was discussed.

Expect so see a minimum wage bill sent to the president. Expect action on a comprehensive immigration bill. Expect a more inclusive paradigm concerning Iraq.

And be sure that Latinos had a hand in making this happen. We can all sit for the picture some other day.