November 5, 2008
"Look at this. It's history."
Thousands throng to hear the word CHICAGO -- Barack Obama came home to Chicago last night to deliver the most historic speech in a career of historic speeches, and to follow through on the second piece of his promise of hope and change.
"A new dawn of american leadership is at hand," Obama told the world across a crowd of 888 thousand in Chicago's Grant Park.
After a night that brought a decisive outcome to a campaign so fraught with intensity it riveted the world, Obama announced that, "Change has come to America."
Perhaps with an eye to the immeasurable expectations his candidacy has fueled, he cautioned, "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even on term but America -- I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there."
Obama will now become the first African-American president in the racially troubled history of this country after a Homeric 22-month campaign in which he slayed, with formidable calm, the most daunting dragons of American power politics, including the Clinton political machine, the Republican political machine and, most historically of all, any enduring belief that a black man can't be president.
In the streets of Chicago, as Obama was declared the winner of a grueling campaign against John McCain that was never going to be easy, the throngs of thousands in Grant Park erupted and the streets filled with the din of honking horns.
The festive atmosphere in Obama's hometown had built throughout the day as strangers in the Loop, along the Magnificent Mile, in stores and restaurants asked each other, "Did you vote yet?"
Yesterday afternoon, as people were still voting at the polling station across Michigan Ave., hundreds waited in the Indian Summer heat, the young people forming "Where are you from?" clusters.
"This is like the '60s!" said Pierre Paul Dorelien, 39, who took a train from his home in Montreal to Windsor Monday morning, then rented a car to drive the rest of the way.
Dorelien, a businessman born in Haiti, said when he told his 9-year old son he was driving to Chicago, the boy didn't ask why.
"He knew why I had to come. His only question was, 'Can I come with you?'"
Bess Greenberg, 29, a freelance photographer from Brooklyn, drove with her mother all day Monday.
"I had to be here. This man has changed the way young people view politics. I actually feel a greater sense of responsibility because of him."
In a testament to Obama's enormous and sometimes controversial popularity abroad, many of the people waiting were either foreigners living in the US or had come from abroad to be here for the speech.
Annette Behrens, 40, a German citizen living in the Chicago suburbs, was waiting outside Grant Park for Obama's speech with her three young daughters, "so they can see what politics can mean."
By dusk, thousands of people swarmed through the streets of downtown Chicago toward Grant Park on the city's lakefront as vendors hawked Obama T-shirts, masks and action figures.
Inside the park, after dark, tens of thousands of people stood together, necks craned, watching CNN on jumbotrons. Lighted windows in the skyscrapers lining the park added to the festive atmosphere, spelling out "USA" and "Vote 2008."
It was like a twilight zone version of a massive rock concertleft to get to 270 electoral votes.
As the results poured in and the night looked better and better for Obama, the crowd grew calmer, waiting to hear about what comes next from the once longshot candidate who'd be talking to the world last night from Chicago.
If the people themselves were part of that message, then the world would see itself in a crowd of every age, colour and economic background.
Frederikke Toemmergaard, 27, came all the way to Chicago instead, leaving her job in Denmark for 10 days to be a witness to history.
"We all wanted him to win so badly. Look at this. It's history."
November 4, 2008
Today is the day to rejoice! - final thoughts on election 08
There are not many days where one vote has the power to do so much. Today, a vote for Barack Obama redresses the great sin of America's past, the great sin of the human family throughout history. But a vote for Barack Obama also allows us to chart a new and transforming course for our own lives, and all those who will come after us.November 4th, 2008 will become a landmark for all people of the world - one we will look back on as a marker of the day we changed course and began to build a new and better world.
Not many people get a chance to live on such days as today ...
All the more reason to look back this morning at those who made this day possible.
Two days ago, during the roundtable discussion on 'This Week' on ABC, longtime democratic activist, Donna Brazile spoke of the key moment of this campaign - not as something that happened this year, but with a reference to the past ... to the 'Bloody Sunday' of the civil rights era. I was profoundly moved by her remarks and sent her a note saying just that. Later in the day, on this new 'Sunday' on the eve of a new era, I received what will always be, for me, THE quote of this presidential campaign:"Without those brave men and women -- those four little girls and countless others knocking on Freedom's door, we would have waited longer and suffered more. Their blood was our redemption. Their bravery our inspiration. Their courage our motivation. Now it's time to vote and begin an era of reconciliation and change." - Donna Brazile
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ps - Obama wins early vote in New Hampshire!
from the Boston GlobeDIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. - Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, where the tradition of having the first Election Day ballots tallied lives on.
Democrat Obama defeated Republican John McCain by 15 to 6 in Dixville Notch, where a loud whoop accompanied the announcement. Hart's Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain, and two for write-in Ron Paul. Independent Ralph Nader was on both towns' ballots, but got no votes.
Dixville Notch's first voter, following tradition, was picked ahead of the midnight voting, and the rest of the town's 20 registered voters followed suit in today's first minutes.
Town Clerk Rick Erwin said the northern New Hampshire town is proud of its tradition, but added "the most important thing is that we exemplify a 100 percent vote."
With 115 residents between them, Dixville Notch and Hart's Location's get every eligible voter to the polls beginning at midnight on Election Day. The towns have been enjoying their first-vote status since 1948.
Being first means something to residents of the Granite State, home of the nation's earliest presidential primary and the central focus, however briefly, of the vote-watching nation's attention every four years.
New Hampshire law requires polls to open by 11 a.m., but that does not stop towns from opening earlier. It also allows towns to close their polls once all registered and eligible voters have cast ballots.
Hart's Location started opening its polls early in 1948, the year President Truman beat Thomas Dewey, to accommodate its resident railroad workers, who had to get to work early.
The town got out of the early voting business in 1964 after some residents grew weary of all the publicity, but brought it back in 1996.
Dixville Notch, nestled in a mountain pass 1,800 feet up and about halfway between the White Mountain National Forest and the Canadian border, started voting early in 1960, when John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon, the Republican, swept all nine votes cast in Dixville that year.November 3, 2008
An Admirable Campaign Journey
By David S. Broder | Sunday, November 2, 2008 | Washington, PostWhen Barack Obama began his candidacy for the White House 20 months ago, most Americans knew next to nothing about the young senator from Illinois, barely two years into his first term in federal office.
After his performance in 2004, some Democratic activists had marked him as the best convention speaker since Ted Kennedy, Ann Richards or Mario Cuomo. Others had read his book "Dreams From My Father" and had declared him their finest literary talent since Ted Sorensen was ghostwriting for John F. Kennedy. Still others remarked on the fact that, unlike many of the party leaders in Washington, Obama had been prescient in his opposition to the U.S. attack on Iraq.
But no one knew much about his political skills or his ideology, and so he was generally underestimated as a threat to Hillary Clinton and the others who lined up to seek the 2008 prize.
What we have learned since then has been impressive. The most basic question about him -- or about anyone seeking the presidency -- is whether he has the capacity to lead the country and manage the government. Nothing in Obama's history -- lawyer, community organizer, state legislator and back-bench senator -- had demonstrated extraordinary skills. The proof had to come from the campaign itself.
As soon as I saw him on the small-town circuit in Iowa, where he began his pursuit of office, two things became clear.
First, he could generate votes by the force of his rhetoric and personality; he was not yet a celebrity, but he already had the capacity to convert strangers into friends.
And second, he had a cadre of people working for him who knew what they were doing. Though many of them were in their first presidential campaign, they were not amateurs. They understood their responsibilities and -- reflecting Obama's own self-discipline -- they went about their work with minimal waste of energy.
Somehow, this young senator had developed a battle plan for an awesomely intimidating and expensive process. Mitt Romney, with his Harvard Business School MBA, was no more efficient than Obama.
Of course, running a good campaign is not a guarantee of success as president. Jimmy Carter figured out brilliantly how to move from Plains, Ga., to the White House, a journey almost as implausible as Obama's, but he didn't know how to govern once he got there.
Obama has been Carteresque in the extravagance -- and vagueness -- of his promises to change Washington. But he is not afflicted with Carter's intellectual-moral contempt for other politicians, the trait that wrecked Carter's relationship with a Democratic Congress. On the contrary, Obama moves well among the political insiders, even while presenting an outsider's visage to the public.
What we have learned of Obama's programs puts him squarely in the liberal tradition of the party. Unlike Bill Clinton, he has not tried to spell out the ways in which he would propose to rewrite Democratic foreign or domestic policy. As a result, we can only guess what his real priorities -- in a time of severe budget constraints and a backlog of accumulated needs -- would be. One can imagine serious debates within an Obama administration and between his White House and Congress.
In what history may record as his singular achievement -- dealing with the classic American dilemma of race -- he had the largely unappreciated help of his opponent, John McCain, who simply ruled out covert racial appeals used by politicians of both parties in the past. But Obama himself demonstrated repeatedly how to bridge the racial divides that still remain, by emphasizing his calm good judgment and respect for others. As a symbol of that national maturity, he carries a powerful, positive message to the world.
Obama is not, any more than other politicians, a paragon. He reneged on his promise to use public funds for his general election campaign, driving a stake into the heart of the post-Watergate effort to reform the campaign finance system. He rejected McCain's invitation to hold joint town hall meetings -- opening the door to the kind of tawdry exchange of charges that we have seen. In both instances, he put his personal goals ahead of the public good -- a worrisome precedent.
But he has engendered widespread enthusiasm in a jaded and cynical public, especially among young people. And if he does not disillusion them in the years ahead, that would be a real gift to the nation.
On the ground in Chicago
Chicago loves its Democratic native son CHICAGO -- If there were a classic B-movie about the giant purple blob of hope and change threatening to take over Washington in January, it might be called It Came From Chicago.
On a gorgeous Indian Summer Sunday, two days before Election Day, the Windy City isn't living up to its name at all. From down Lakeshore Drive, the glinting cityscape in its balmy haze looks a lot more benign than its early caricature of butcher's blood and wise guys.
In Hyde Park, the leafy, lefty enclave where the Obamas live and where Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, there are hardly any lawn signs because it is so sewn up both as a slice of the party's base and as the candidate's personal base.
'A MADHOUSE'
Jean Smith, 68, a home health care provider, said her biggest concern for tomorrow is turnout. "It'll be a madhouse. There's been a lot of early voting here but it's still going to be crazy."
With some experts predicting the highest voter turnout in a century and early voters already posting record numbers and record-long waits, the odds of the madhouse being national, not just local, could be pretty high.
At the Treasure Island supermarket, bookkeeper Nacole Tate, 36, has a hard time thinking of one McCain voter she knows. "Oh, yeah. I have an uncle who told us the other night he'd already voted for McCain and we couldn't believe it. He said he was worried about Obama taxing the rich. It didn't make much sense because this uncle never seemed too rich to us."
This is such a Democratic town that John McCain felt sure enough it wouldn't lose him any votes to run a fright ad in September decrying the "Corrupt Chicago political machine."
It's hard to imagine a Canadian candidate slamming an opponent's hometown, but Canadian campaigns are nowhere near as brutal and "the corrupt Calgary political machine" just doesn't have the same ring.
That old Chicago stereotype of Cook County math and, per the McCain ad, dubious political machinery may have been permanently overwritten by the culture of this campaign.
NO ZEN GARB
It's impossible to run a campaign as anything other than what it is because the operation is always part of the story and the Chicago-based brains behind the Obama operation weren't just sporting Zen garb.
They ran against traditional campaigning by eschewing it for something less reactive, more grassroots, less tactical and stunningly free of neurosis (and I say that as an utterly neurotic observer).
Studs Terkel, the great Chicago storyteller who died last Friday at 96, once famously said of his beloved adopted hometown, "Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It is the most theatrically corrupt."
It would seem impossible for anything that comes next to dwarf the unprecedented epic drama of the past two years. But if the sequel comes from Chicago, it may not live up to that old reputation, either.
November 2, 2008
Short of skinny legs, what's left to factor in?
by Lisa Van Dusen | Sunday, 2 November 2008CHICAGO -- In this last weekend before the U.S. election day, which will leave many of us who've been mainlining campaign news for the past year with a void that may have to be filled by online poker and Cheetos, you would think that all the questions that were going to be asked and answered had been asked and answered.
But the last three days are when, after 245 months of campaigning, many undecided voters decide and many decided voters decide whether to actuallyvote. So what happens now, in many ways, is the most important bit.It is 72 hours before election day and Illinois, where Barack Obama is up by 24 points, is relatively quiet on the campaign front -- except for the dust from the carloads of volunteers zooming into neighbouring Indiana, which remains in a dead heat.
While the most hard-fought presidential election in anyone's memory is about to become the most hard-won presidential election in anyone's memory, Chicago, where Barack Obama got his political start and where his campaign is based, seems to be quietly bracing itself for the possibility that it could be the site of the next weekend White House, only without so much brush clearing.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Obama campaign is buying up ad time in John McCain's own yard partly because the state has slipped into margin-of-error range for McCain and partly because they can afford to remind him that they can afford to remind him.
In the past week, the national polls tightened up as they tend to near Election Day, though with the American electoral system, the state polls are more significant. It takes 270 Electoral College votes to be elected president and as of midday Saturday, RealClearPolitics was estimating Obama at 311 to McCain's 132, with 95 toss-up.
On the McCain/Palin tour, Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is being touted more and more as something -- anything -- in 2012, even as Republicans outside the two-person maverick wing of the party keep raising alarms about her qualifications.
Joe the Plumber, who would be getting his own campaign plane if the election were another week away, was holding foreign policy briefings and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually is an elected politician, was mocking, as only a former Mr. World can, Barack Obama's "skinny legs" in an apparent effort to sway undecideds on an Obama disqualifier they hadn't heard.
(Obama should finally draw the line at this. "Terrorist pal," "socialist," "redistributionist-in-chief" were pretty low, but "skinny legs" is fightin' words. Maybe not to Arnie's face, but it's a point worth making.)
Because American presidential elections haven't always necessarily panned out as predicted ("Dewey Defeats Truman!", "Al Gore wins the State of Florida"), especially in recent memory, it would be crazy for the Republicans not to maintain a stance of "all bets are off" until the last minute and equally crazy for Democrats to argue.
After record early voting turnout in many states, this is now all about getting out the vote on election day, motivating the undecideds to decide and making sure all the votes are counted.
Which pits the mythology from the last two elections of the famously motivated Republican base that Sarah Palin has been shaking up against the newer but already established mythology of the primary-tested, web-driven, virally motivational and well-financed Obama ground game.
In those past two elections, the Republicans were so focused on the importance of the final three days that they actually broke it out strategically as a 72-hour push. This time, the focus will be on, among other thing, those undecided voters.
After so much time, so many debates, so many speeches and so many interviews, it's hard to fathom what deciding factor would be compelling enough to make up an unmade-up mind, unless leg-skinniness really is the sleeper issue nobody saw coming.
"This country needs a president who can restore its vigor at home and revive its image abroad."
Our Opinion: Barack Obama for presidentThe State-Journal Register | Novemeber 2, 2008
ON SEPT. 12, 2001, the United States received messages of support and condolence from around the globe as this nation struggled to comprehend the previous day’s terrorist attacks. At home, we vowed to set aside our petty differences and unite as Americans.
Today we struggle to comprehend how this nation squandered the near universal good will expressed then. We wonder how the same population that vowed unity then has become so bitterly divided.
The disastrously planned invasion of Iraq earned us the enmity of much of the world and has divided us at home. The war on terror has scarred this country’s human rights record. Three years ago, we and the rest of the world watched helplessly as an inept federal government stumbled while thousands of people struggled to survive Hurricane Katrina’s wrath in New Orleans. Like an exclamation point at the end of the Bush administration, the economy now teeters on the brink of collapse.
We believe this country needs healing internally to end the class and cultural warfare that has reached levels today we never thought we’d see again after 9/11. The United States’ current international image as the world’s bully must be reformed if we hope to effect stability in regions that are now hotbeds of terrorism and nuclear adventurism. Economic recovery, as we see it, is dependent on those goals.
FOR THOSE critical efforts, we believe Barack Obama is the best choice as our next president.
Throughout a grueling primary campaign that began here at the Old State Capitol, Obama went from extreme underdog to the confident, self-assured candidate of the Democratic Party. His poise on the campaign trail since then is no surprise to us. We saw it in person four years ago when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate and, later, when he met with The State Journal-Register editorial board again after winning his Senate seat. Thoughtful, engaging and intellectually nimble, Obama exuded a sense of quiet self-confidence rare among politicians.
But poise and eloquence alone, as Obama’s detractors have pointed out ad nauseum, don’t make a president, and neither do we rely solely on those qualities in endorsing Obama.
OBAMA'S ADVOCACY of diplomacy in dealing with countries that we now shun, like Iran, is a necessity in our quest to bring “rogue” nations into the global community. We think an Obama administration, which would represent a complete break from Bush policies of the last eight years, would make such diplomacy not only possible, but effective.
We find Obama’s health-care plan, which provides incentives for employers to provide insurance and will make it more difficult for insurance companies to decline coverage based on pre-existing conditions, to be vastly superior to John McCain’s proposed $5,000 tax credit.
While McCain has chided Obama throughout the campaign for opposing last year’s troop surge in Iraq, we side with Obama in noting that the Iraq war began in 2003, not 2007. Clinging to ill-defined notions of “victory” at this stage will only prolong what is already viewed as our occupation of Iraq. An Obama presidency would send a signal to Iraq that it is time to stop relying on America to maintain stability there.
We also think Obama’s personal story — born to a single mother, raised by grandparents, struggling with his own identity — put him in a position to be uniquely empathetic with many Americans of humble means who are now working to emulate his success story.
WE'D BE REMISS if we did not add here that we are profoundly disappointed in the tone McCain’s campaign embraced throughout this race. Hiring the very people who so thoroughly smeared him in South Carolina in 2000 did not serve McCain well. While sounding a call of bipartisan unity, McCain’s actions did otherwise, painting his opponent as an exotic and unknown figure to be feared and mistrusted. His selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was an insult to those who looked to McCain to restore strength and stability to the Republican party.
Those, however, are not the reasons for our endorsement of Obama. This country needs a president who can restore its vigor at home and revive its image abroad. Barack Obama should be that president.
