Some Details on Obama's Historic Victory Video
(Top Posts - Social/Legal - 110508 to 110608)

November 5, 2008

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Barack Obama elected 44th president
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27531033
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Excerpts:

Barack Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator
from Illinois, shattered more than 200 years of
history Tuesday night by winning election as the
first African-American president of the United
States.

A crowd of 125,000 people jammed Grant Park
in Chicago, where Obama addressed the nation
for the first time as its president-elect at midnight
ET.




Hundreds of thousands more - Mayor Richard
Daley said he would not be surprised if a million
Chicagoans jammed the streets - watched on a
large television screen outside the park.

"If there is anyone out there who doubts that Amer-
ica is a place where anything is possible, who still
wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in
our time, who still questions the power of our dem-
ocracy, tonight is your answer," Obama declared.

"Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Repub-
lican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American,
gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans
have sent a message to the world that we have never
been just a collection of red states and blue states,"
he said. "We have been and always will be the United
States of America.

"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because
of what we did on this day, in this election, at this
defining moment, change has come to America," he
said to a long roar.

...

A broad and deep victory

Campaigning as a technocratic agent of change in
Washington and not a pathbreaking civil rights figure,
Obama swept to victory over McCain, whose running
mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was seeking to become
the nation's first female vice president.

Obama's election was a broad one. He won Florida,
the scene of so much electoral chaos in recent elections.
He won Ohio, a key to President Bush's two election
wins. He won Colorado, home of the religious right.
And he won Virginia, reversing 40 years of Republican
victories there.

Surveys of voters as they left polling places nation-
wide encapsulated the historic nature of the victory by
Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother
from Kansas. As expected, he won overwhelmingly
among African-American voters, but he also won a
slim majority of white voters. He won among women
and Latino voters, reversing a longstanding Republican
trend. And he won by more than 2-to-1 among voters
of all races 30 years old and younger.

That dynamic was telling in Ohio and in Pennsylvania,
where McCain poured in millions of dollars of scarce
resources. Obama won both, along with Massachusetts,
Michigan, New Jersey and New York, all states with
hefty electoral vote hauls, NBC News projected.

...
Obama will have a strongly Democratic Congress on the
other end of Capitol Hill. The Democrats won strong
majorities in both the House and the Senate.

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- - - end excerpts - - -

- - -
Women's support proves key in battlegrounds

Female voters heavily favor Obama,
helping propel historic victory
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27524699/
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Excerpts:

...
Women voters typically are crucial to a Democratic
presidential victory, and Obama was pulling 55 per-
cent of their votes, compared with 43 percent for
McCain, according to exit polls. Obama and McCain
were nearly even among male voters, who split 49-49
percent.

...

- - - end excerpt - - -

- - -
Youth vote may have been key in Obama's win

Young voters had 'record turnout,'
preferred Democrat by wide margin
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27525497/
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Excerpts:

Early reports are indicating that the youngest members
of the country's electorate voted Tuesday in higher
numbers than in the last presidential election - and
they voted more Democratic. Youth turnout appears
to be exceeding 2004 levels, which was itself a year
with a big surge in voters ages 18 to 29.

...

What's more, young voters may prove to have been
the key to Barack Obama's victory. Young voters pre-
ferred Obama over John McCain by 68 percent to 30
percent - the highest share of the youth vote obtained
by any candidate since exit polls began reporting results
by age in 1976 ...
- - - end excerpts - - -

(follow-up on November 6)

Someone wrote:

> 10:00 pm Central Time, Tuesday November 4th.  I will remember that for
> the rest of my life.  Standing in Grant Park on what had to be one of
> the most beautiful November evenings in Chicago.

> 9:59 and everyone knew.  Virginia had just come in and everyone knew
> that at the top of the hour, California, Oregon and Washington would
> close and with that enough electoral votes to put Obama over the top.
> CNN on the jumbotron and we were counting down just like at a football
> game.

>BREAKING NEWS and everyone just started screaming and yelling and
> jumping and crying and hugging everyone in sight.  Mostly young kids
> and I could see and feel the sheer joy and excitement.

> Earlier at the hotel, I was up in my room watching the early returns.
> They couldn't call Virginia, they couldn't call Indiana.  I was a
> nervous wreck so I went downstairs to have a drink and watch the
> returns with what Rush Limbaugh would refer to as the limoseum
> liberals.  They had CNN on but we couldn't hear that well.

> All of a sudden, they project Ohio and we knew.  No drama anyone, it
> was over and all we had to do was wait for the west coast.  The first
> round of screaming and yelling and jumping for sheer joy but this time
> by folks much older but just as enthusiastic.

> I finished my drink (well, several drinks) and headed for Grant Park.

> [...]

> Obama's speech was so uplifting, so mesmorizing.  The one thing that
> Obama said that was not quite true was that he was the unlikeliest
> candidate.  Anyone who knows this man's talent knows that there was
> nothing unlikely about this at all.

My reply:

Thanks for sharing your experience with us. It must've
been a tremendously exciting event, as we've seen in
the many reports of people crying when the announce-
ment was made.

Unfortunately, I had made plans to stay up and watch
the election results, but shortly after 7 PM, I lost con-
sciousness (due to my blood sugar being too low) and
didn't wake up until shortly before I made the post
which began this thread.

Even though delayed, and despite knocking my com-
puter to the floor, I got the computer re-booted and
I cried, too, when I saw the news reports which at the
time I awakened were re-broadcasting Obama's speech
at Grant Park.

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Speaking of Obama and what his impact may be, there
is at least one of his plans I oppose, that being his plan
to further the Bush regime's faith-based-initiative. I per-
ceive that to be a serious infringement of the Constitu-
tion's separation of church and state, and even though
Obama's version does, at first glance, appear to try to
keep the church/mosque/temple/synagogue proselytiz-
ing out of the aid picture, and does try to instruct reli-
gious entities not to proselytize, that's somewhat akin
to telling a football team they'll only get paid if they
commit no penalties. In other words, it's against their
core nature.

Putting that aside, and trying to relate to whatever vote
gains Obama was trying to get (from the christian-right)
with that move, I don't agree that pragmatism over-
rules the Constitution's separation of church and state,
and to try to dabble in that area is flirting with the core
elements of religious anti-humanism profuse in reli-
gious dogma, something the government should be far
removed from, something the founding fathers of our
country endeavored to keep *out* of goverment, know-
ing full well that the nature of religion when married to
goverment was a severe risk to human welfare and to
the ability of the government to act in a manner con-
sistent with human welfare.

The long history of European religious-inspired hatred
as well as the recent religious attacks on America should
serve as admonitions against any and all efforts to marry
the government to the church/mosque/temple/synagogue.

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