Yep, Pace had his first visit to his day care in Regina today – monumental!
Just kidding. Obviously, the only story today is that, after months and months of electioneering, there will be a new US President. And at the risk of jinxing it, the most respected polling aggregator is predicting a 99% chance of an Obama victory.
It's been a captivating campaign. The first mention of Barack Obama on this blog was eleven months ago – at a point where the leading contenders for the Republican nomination were Rudy Guiliani and Mitt Romney and John McCain had been written off. The leading contenders for the for the Democratic nomination were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama but Obama was still seen as a definite underdog at that point against the Clinton machine.
But, other than the small details that he's half-black and has Muslim roots (including the middle name “Hussein”), you probably couldn't create a better candidate for the US election than Barack Obama – worldly, intelligent, ground-breaking – both in his personal life (first black editor of the Harvard Law Review) and his use of technology, eloquent, compassionate, youthful, handsome. But even the “negatives” about his blackness and his Muslim roots may have helped him in a weird way. Some have speculated that there may be a rebound effect after eight years of the definition of a homogenous “good old boy”, George W. Bush (or at least that's what he plays on TV) with people trying to pick somebody as far from what George W. Bush represents as possible. A related point – some have wondered if there's a Huxtable effect – where notable changes in society are often presaged by a sea change in pop culture twenty years earlier.
Also of great interest to me personally is the massive role the Internet played in this election in everything from blog-based attacks to viral YouTube videos to fundraising records being set to mobilizing voters across the nation.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is the fact that, in a few hours, the United States will likely have its very first black President. And if I'm honest with myself, that's something I wasn't sure I'd ever live to see. The odds seemed so great against it, the racism in the US too deep. Instead, it's not just in my youngish lifetime that I'll get to see it. But even more amazingly, folks like Charles will too…
(have your hankies ready if you watch this video):
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