A truly remarkable thing happened in Washington last night, as the world finished watching Barack Obama deliver his victory speech in Chicago and hundreds of election-watch parties being held by Democrats in raucous bars and shi-shi hotel ballrooms across the capital broke up after hours of non-stop whooping and cheering.
Someone, or more likely several someones, made a decision to march on the White House. And seemingly the rest of the city followed on behind.
They streamed down the hill from Adams Morgan, down 16th St and along Pennsylvania Avenue to converge on the edge of Lafayette Park. They sang songs, beat on drums, waved life-size cardboard replicas of Obama, hugged, kissed, high-fived and alternated chants of "Yes we can!" with "No more Bush!" For blocks around, cars lined up along the improbably jammed downtown streets echoed the rhythm of those chants with volley after volley of three short toots of their horns.
This wasn't an organized celebration like the gathering in Chicago's Grant Park. It didn't involve buses and organizers and legal protection volunteers, like the vast protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle nine years ago, or the mass demonstrations on the eve of the Iraq war. It was something altogether more unusual in American public life: a spontaneous political gathering of thousands of ecstatic, peaceful revellers who decided to make their feelings known before the most powerful political office on the planet. It was a celebration, for sure, but it was also some kind of deeper statement: that the people had been living under some sort of perversion of democracy for a long time but now felt emboldened to claim it back for themselves.
The disaster of the last eight years under Bush, as well as the overwhelming partisan preference of the District's residents (Obama got 92 per cent of the vote here), certainly did a lot to fuel that sentiment. But it also went a lot deeper than that. For too long, politics in this country -- both Republican and Democrat -- has been seen as something intangible and inaccessible to ordinary people and their everyday concerns. Now, with a black man pulling off the astonishing feat of rising to the presidency in a land riven by racism for more than two centuries, there was a sense of extraordinary release, and even more extraordinary empowerment. For one night at least, we could fantasize that the White House was the people's house, after all.
The moment couldn't help but remind me of the extraordinary outpourings of "people power" that toppled the Communist governments of eastern Europe in 1989, or of the hugely inventive, almost poetic mass demonstrations in Serbia in the mid-1990s against the despotic rule of Slobodan Milosevic. "We are the people," they chanted in Leipzig and Berlin in those heady days. A very similar sentiment abounded last night in the usually staid confines of downtown Washington.
Many, many Obama supporters kept saying how relieved they felt, as if a great burden had been lifted. The African Americans were the most exuberant (of course). Nobody, black or white, young or old, could quite believe what was happening. Even the Secret Service and the DC cops keeping an eye from a discreet distance said they had seen nothing like it.
This is what democracy at its best looks like. This is how people come to have hope in the future again. Now, of course, it's up to the new administration to deliver -- an altogether trickier proposition.
Well, if the U.,S. had overthrown Bush in 2003 ... that would be another story
This was not an election about Socialism vs Capitalism
This was not an election about Rich vs Poor, Black vs White, Young vs Old.
This was an election about the Hope for the Future vs the Fear Rooted in the Past
And Hope Won!!
As he said from the stage
As the video sang on YouTube
As the world collectively prayed
YES WE CAN!
Xenophobic bluster and belicosity lost. I don't feel so outnumbered after all.
I have yet to see a campaign so dirty and so full of lies BUT they did not prevail. Those who organized and pushed for the divisive and ideological elements, for a time, are overcome but they are too determined to ever stop their efforts. Rational people everywhere must work together in the future, as they did this time, to keep the extremists at bay.
Barack Obama is an American, and he belongs to the same race to which the rest of us belong. The one "human" race.
Advanced genetic research has proven that each and everyone of us is descended from a small band of people who migrated out Africa and populated the world. So we can just as easily say we are all African Americans.
It was the media that injected the race card into this election day after day. Unfortunately a lot of John McCain's and Sarah Palin's supporters signed on to that representation. I know, because if ran into the bigotry, hatred and fear mongering on the Internet every day. In my view, the media are as culpable as they are.
Luckily most of America believe that Barack Obama is an American.
Congratulations President-Elect Barack Obama and Vice-President Elect Joe Biden.
I don't mean genetically, but rather from an environmental point of view - he hardly knew his African father and was brought up by white people without any connection to the "black experience".
For example, he is not the descendant of slaves and had no relationship with people who have had second-hand knowledge of what slavery was like. The mental scars that seem to be inherited or passed on due to early and repetitious exposure to retelling have been the subject of many psychological studies. He would never have been exposed to this. As a child, he also would have never had the experience of family gatherings during which discussion and acceptance of what it means to be black in the USA was the dominant topic.
In fact Barack's childhood had more in common with a white person than with a black person.
I'm not saying that his teenage and adult years have not taught him about the implications of his skin color; only that purely from a comparative perspective, classifying him as black is decidedly more inaccurate than classifying him as white.