Barack Obama, our next president

Picture posted by Samotalis: Obama with Somali camel.

By Mark Silva Tribune correspondent

11:22 PM CST, November 4, 2008

Barack Obama, who launched an admittedly improbable campaign for the presidency 21 months ago with a remarkably focused appeal to a widespread hunger for change in a distressed nation, has claimed an insurmountable majority of the electoral votes required to name him the 44th president.

Obama soaked in his achievement at a Grant Park rally around 11 p.m. before a crowd of 25,000.

"Hello, Chicago,'' said Obama, arriving on stage with his wife and two daughters. "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer ...

"It's the answer that led those who had been told by so long, by so many, to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we could achieve, to put their hand on the arc of history and bend it for another day,'' he said. "At this defining moment, change has come to America.''

Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, is poised to become the first African-American president in a nation that shed slavery in the 19th Century and did not secure legal voting rights for minorities until late in the 20th Century, if the election results turning his way held steady. His supporters at Grant Park cheered the returns and the Republican's concession.

"We have come to the end of a long journey," Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, said tonight in Arizona after making a private telephone call to Obama to concede the election. "The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly."

McCain called on his supporters to rally behind Obama and reunite the warring political factions of a hard-fought and long-waged political campaign.

"It is natural tonight to feel some disappointment," McCain said, "but tomorrow, we must... get our country moving forward again."

President George W. Bush called Obama shortly after 10 p.m. EST to congratulate him on his victory.

Obama took command of the electoral count by appealing to voters in places that haven't voted Democratic in decades, including Virginia, which had not backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And he staked a claim in key battleground states, such as bellwether Ohio and Florida, a state that has only sparingly gone Democratic in modern times.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, Obama forced his Republican rival, the senior senator from Arizona, to fight for support in states that Republicans long have relied upon. This was McCain's second, and likely final, bid for the presidency. McCain lost to Obama in New Hampshire, a state which had backed Bush, and where McCain had launched both of his campaigns for the presidency, in 2000 and this year.

Obama, 47, would not be the youngest president ever — only John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton were younger at election. But Obama's appeal to younger generations, including an unprecedented effort by the Democratic Party to register new voters and draw them out to the polls in early-voting and again today, augurs a potential new era of political involvement in a nation facing a likely recession and two protracted and costly wars abroad.

"When the polls close, the journey ends," Obama said of his long quest for the White House, boarding a campaign plane home to Chicago.

But for Obama, the journey would just be beginning.

Obama, a Harvard-trained attorney, was born of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya who left the family early on, leaving Obama to be raised largely by his mother and also by his grandmother in Hawaii — who passed away on the eve of Election Day.

He never served in the military, but rather served as a community organizer in Chicago and penned a best-selling memoir in his 30s, "Dreams From My Father."

Obama launched a self-styled "audacious'' campaign for the presidency on a cold day in Springfield, Ill., in February 2007. He would go on to raise more money than any presidential candidate in history — more than $600 million — and overrun the candidacy of one of the biggest names in American politics, defeating New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for his party's nomination in June.

McCain, never the darling of his own party for his willingness to confront issues such as campaign financing limitations and immigration reform in cooperation with Democrats, managed to wrest the nomination this year from a crowded GOP field.

He attempted to cast himself as the world-experienced candidate, and his campaign commercials derided Obama as "dangerously unprepared'' to lead. Yet with the naming of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, the selection of the first-term governor and former small-town mayor for a position "a heartbeat away'' from the presidency undercut his experience argument.

McCain, dubbing himself "the original maverick,'' attempted to pivot with a campaign promising change. Yet this was the clarion call that Obama had first made in Springfield and a theme that the Democrat pursued with unwavering consistency — "change that we can believe in.'' And, ironically, Obama tapped a running mate, longtime Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, with decades of experience in Washington.

Obama also campaigned with sweeping promises for an embattled America both at home and abroad. He has promised to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of election and has vowed to offer health care for millions of Americans lacking it. It would come all with costs, Obama conceded — promising tax cuts for 95 percent of all Americans, but tax increases for the wealthiest few to pay for his plans.

And Obama made a concerted effort to saddle McCain with his own party's unpopular retiring president, George W. Bush, holding a 25 percent job approval rating in the latest Gallup Poll — nearly an all-time low for American presidents since World War II. (Harry Truman fell to 22 and Richard Nixon to 24 before he resigned.) Obama and his party portrayed McCain simply as "more of the same.''

McCain, asserting that "I am not George Bush,'' attempted to distance himself from his party's president and contend that Obama's tax increases would offer nothing but harm for a stumbling economy. He seized upon late-campaign comments of a supporter in Ohio, "Joe the Plumber,'' to portray Obama's plans as "socialism.''

But Obama, who had built a deep fundraising base with an Internet campaign capitalizing on energetic support from younger voters, vastly outspent McCain in the most competitive states. Obama mounted not only a pervasive television campaign — culminating in a half-hour of prime-time TV in the contest's final week — but also a field operation of voter registration, campaign canvassers and a get-out-the-vote operation unparalleled in Democratic presidential campaigns.

Obama appeared on track to earn the highest share of votes for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, who won more than 60 percent in 1964. Jimmy Carter won 50.1 percent of the vote in 1976, the last Democrat to win a true majority. Bill Clinton won with pluralities in 1992 and 1996. The high-water mark for any presidential candidate in the last 30 years was Ronald Reagan, who earned 59 percent in 1984.

Clinton and Carter both took office with large Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill. Buoyed by anti-Republican waves following the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon's resignation, Carter entered the White House in 1977 with 61 Democrats in the Senate and 292 in the House.

Clinton entered in 1993 with 57 Senate Democrats and 258 in the House. For all the discussion of race as a factor in the election, pre-election polls suggested Obama was poised to earn as much — or more — of the white vote as any Democratic presidential candidate in 32 years.

Polling from Quinnipiac University showed Obama on pace to earn 44 percent of the white vote, the same as Clinton in 1992, and more than failed Democratic contenders Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry. Carter won 48 percent of the white vote in 1976. The last Democrat to carry the white vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964; Johnson went on to sign civil rights legislation he predicted would cost Democrats southern white support for a generation.

Analysts were closely watching two other demographic groups for turnout this year: African-Americans and young people, both expected to lean heavily toward Obama. Participation among voters ages 18 to 29 was predicted to approach the all-time high of 55 percent of those eligible set in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War draft and a year after the 26th Amendment set the national minimum voting age at 18.

David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert on black turnout, predicted African-Americans would top 67 percent turnout nationally — shatter the record of nearly 60 percent in 1964. In 2004, black turnout was 56 percent.

Bositis said the spike in turnout might be felt most strongly in states like Virginia, which only saw a 30 percent turnout in 2004, when it was not a contested state. And he noted that early voting in Georgia showed a leap there from 25 percent in 2004 to 35 percent this time around.

He said African-American voters are motivated by more than just the prospect of the first black president. "African-Americans have done very poorly economically under George Bush," he said. "Quite frankly, if Hillary [Clinton] was the candidate, there would still be an increase. People vote when they are unhappy."

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