DONNA BRAZILE: Reasons to celebrate 2014

With the new year approaching, everyone is taking a look back at 2014. What they’re seeing isn’t always pretty, but the truth is that there was plenty of good news in the past 12 months that should be appreciated. So let’s take one more look back at 2014, but this time through slightly rose-colored glasses.

It was certainly a very happy year musically. The No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 2014 was Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” which claimed the top slot even though nobody could figure out exactly what it meant to feel “like a room without a roof.” The past decade has seen No. 1 songs with gloomy titles like “Bad Day” and “Low.” (Though, to be fair, when Flo Rida sang “Low” in 2008, he wasn’t referring to public apathy.) The fact that we were all singing “Happy” for much of the year tells you that 2014 at least aspired to be a great year.

The song “Happy” wasn’t the only thing trending up in 2014. The economy rebounded at a pace that was almost as giddy as Williams himself. We posted the strongest six-month period of growth in over a decade, and had the strongest year for job growth since the Clinton administration. Manufacturing was growing at a rate twice that of the rest of the economy, and overall wages were finally on the rise. Importantly, some of the happiness was finally getting to those on the lower end of the economic spectrum — 14 states increased their minimum wage last year, and President Obama increased it for workers on federal contracts.

And some of the best news that organized labor has had in recent years has come via fast food workers who continued using strikes and activism to fight for a living wage. At times, it felt like the whole economy was a room without a roof, even if it’s still unclear what that means.

If the economy was getting healthier, so were more Americans than ever. Despite conservative crusades to make its very name cause illness, Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, was a robust success. It reduced the number of uninsured adults by 25 percent this year alone, it slowed the rise of health care costs to the lowest rate in half a century, and it has created almost a million health care jobs since 2010. In fact, the ACA has been so successful as health care policy that it has helped several Republican governors get over their severe allergic reactions to Medicaid expansion. In 2014, Republican-controlled statehouses in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Utah all took steps toward embracing the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA in their states.

Also on the public health front, 2014 was a great year to quit tobacco, whether it’s smoking, chewing or selling it. Earlier this year, CVS pharmacies banned the sale of tobacco products and saw revenue jump 9.7 percent. The increase came from a big jump in revenue from their pharmacy services, which more than offset the loss of tobacco revenue. And that would seem to be the way to go — with fewer people smoking and more people getting prescription drug coverage, thanks to the ACA.

Although 2014 was an election year, you didn’t hear much about gas prices, which tells you that gas prices were extremely low. On top of that, America now produces more oil than we buy from overseas for the first time in 20 years. While having cheap fossil fuels is not entirely good news for the planet, steps were being taken to mitigate the damage from the greenhouse gases that those fuels produce. In 2014, President Obama announced an agreement with China on significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.

If we seem to be learning a few lessons, that could be because there was good news on education. It was announced this year that America has reached its highest high school graduation rate in history at 80 percent. For those youngsters just entering our educational system, newly elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pioneering universal pre-K program enrolled 51,000 tots in free, citywide, full-day pre-kindergarten.

Those little pre-kindergarteners will hopefully grow up in a more inclusive world, made possible in part by progress made in 2014. Legalized gay marriage moved much closer to becoming the law of the realm — even in some of the unlikeliest realms imaginable, including Kansas, Wyoming, South Carolina, Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah.

The list of places that have gay marriage now has a huge amount of overlap with the list of places that have monuments of the Ten Commandments outside their courthouses.

In fact, 2014 was a year of falling walls and shattered ceilings in myriad ways both big and small. This year All-American defensive end Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be drafted by an NFL team. And although Sam did not make the cut, it was due not to homophobia, but to the cold calculus of football logic, just like any other player faces.

Also in this past year, 13-year-old Mo’ne Davis became the first girl to pitch and win a game in the Little League World Series — with a 70 mph fastball. Representing a gender that has been virtually shut out of so many professional team sports, Mo’ne’s win was, appropriately, a shutout.

Also posting some impressive numbers in 2014 was Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford. Two decades after Barbie dolls said “Math is hard,” Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal, known as the Nobel Prize of math. Her work involves the symmetry of surface geometry, particularly regarding Teichmueller dynamics, which would be a neat phrase for next year’s Barbie to say.

So, let’s celebrate 2014, so 2015 can become even better.

Happy New Year!

Donna Brazile is a senior Democratic strategist, a political commentator and contributor to CNN and ABC News, and a contributing columnist to Ms. Magazine and O, the Oprah Magazine.