It’s hard to sum up my reactions to Barack Obama’s victory Tuesday night in one blog post. I’ve put it off until now, because I just couldn’t articulate my elation, and I probably won’t even succeed now. For me, election night was quietly spent at home with my boyfriend, as we anxiously watched each state’s results come in. At around 7:45, when I saw the blue and red states spread across MSNBC’s electoral map, and I saw the vote count, I said to myself,”If only they can hold off calling Colorado and Indiana for Obama until the West Coast comes in…I want the West Coast to deliver Obama the victory!” Well, when our local polls closed at 8:00 pm, MSNBC simultaneously called the states of California, Oregon, and Washington for Barack Obama, pushing him well over the 270 threshold of electoral votes, declaring him the next president of the United States. My boyfriend and I jumped up and yelled, and the tears suddenly started rolling down my face. For 10 minutes I cried, as I watched the jubilant crowds across the country yelling and cheering, their own tears running down their cheeks.
What is it about this man that inspires so many millions of people with hope? Were we really that hopeless before? From the moment he sauntered so coolly onto the national state 4 years ago, giving the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he has captured the imagination of the entire country. After 8 years of President Bush ruining our international image, after wincing at his inability to put words together into a coherent sentence, and after losing hope that America would ever be a great nation again, the American people were hungry for real change.
John McCain represented just more of the same. His choice of Sarah Palin as his VP only reinforced the impression that he was pandering to the extreme right of his party, and there was no longer any hope that he was going to be a true bipartisan player in the White House. It was so obvious from the beginning that he believed that by picking a woman, any woman, he would attract women voters, who traditionally vote Democratic. But Sarah Palin does not represent the values of modern American women, and the struggles that women have gone through to attain the freedom they now enjoy, the very freedom that allowed her to become a governor, let alone a Vice Presidential candidate. She is a mockery of the success of feminism, and it was an insult to women to see her on the Republican ticket. In the end, a large majority of women voted for Obama.
Although I never entertained even an idea of voting for him, I know of other Democrats who had a healthy respect for him. That respect was soon lost, however, when McCain began his negative campaigning, veering away from any real discussion of the issues and simply attacking Obama personally, even sometimes racially. McCain himself never uttered one racist attack on Obama, but his campaign ads played on the racist fears of some Americans, painting him as an “other” that they had to be afraid of. His campaign strategy was despicable, and even though I give Palin most of the credit for McCain’s loss, the rest goes to the racism that his negative campaign encouraged. The fact that Obama won so many traditionally Republican states, including Virginia and North Carolina, proves that America is really ready to move on from the racially-inspired fear tactics of the Republican party. They now have the unenviable task of reorganizing and rethinking their party’s priorities and direction.
Barack Obama’s historic victory gives me hope that at long last, even with the tremendous challenges we face, our country is on the right path. By electing the first African-American president, the son of an immigrant, we have finally validated our standing as a world leader for freedom, opportunity, and equality. I’ve never been more proud to be an American than I was on Tuesday night, as I watched the cheering crowds and listened to Obama’s humble, yet courageous message of hope.
