A mandate for change

Not decades from now, but in our lifetime: Yesterday, the nation elected Barack Obama the first African American president. His selection shows the world that America has moved further in dealing with its long and troubled racial history than even its citizens believed possible.

Voters, in potentially record numbers, chose to send a plurality of Democrats to Washington and rejected Republican candidates who played old-fashioned negative politics.

And, wonder of wonders, Ohio and Florida did not end in indecision, blathering pundits, and a militia of lawyers.

In the end, there was one clear loser last night, George W. Bush. "Repudiation of the Bush presidency" was the buzz phrase of the night. Americans may wish him gone, but they'll have to endure 77 days of Lame Duck Soup.

Gov. Rendell, taking a break from his busy Eagles sportscasting stint, appeared on MSNBC to actually talk politics. Compared with 2004, he projected, 400,000 additional votes from Philadelphia, 200,000 from the suburbs, and 25,000 from the Lehigh Valley would go to Obama, as though they were so many peanuts. Turns out Rendell is a superb forecaster. Initial returns showed that Obama won Philadelphia by 83 percent, and the suburbs by 55 to 60 percent. The candidate performed remarkably well in the central (46 percent) and western (54 percent) regions of the state. Those were the areas that Obama had characterized as populated by bitter residents clinging to their guns and religion, one of the few missteps of his almost two-year candidacy.

Mere moments after Pennsylvania polls closed, MSNBC called the state for Obama. CNN waited another half-hour to do so, with a whopping zero percent and 12,000 votes counted. Who knew that after all that money, all those visits, so much attention, and so many, many, many ads, the outcome would be so swift? When Pennsylvania was called, the crowds in Chicago's Grant Park, site of the Democratic Party's 1968 debacle, went wild.

Early last night, the networks began to write a Democratic narrative, much as sports analysts are prone to do, before many of the states' polls had closed. Long before the votes were counted, Republican candidate John McCain sounded elegiac on his final campaign flight, saying goodbye to the media contingent as if for the final time, a strange tone given that not a thing had yet been decided.

All evening long, the Republican commentators were the ultimate pessimists about their candidate and the most praising of Obama. Bill Bennett deemed the Illinois senator's campaign "flawless" while Tom DeLay spoke early of the Obama presidency. Before the Western polls had closed, the McCain campaign turned off the news.

It was also bizarre, given all the technologic advances and the pyrotechnics the networks served up, to see McCain vote the old-fashioned way, by paper ballot between cardboard dividers in his hometown of Phoenix. His wife, Cindy, even held her driver's license in the absurd event that no one recognized her.

The news channels got extremely trippy in a techno-way. MSNBC had a strange Monticello-like Myst setup, sort of a chamber of doom. Not to be undone, CNN had the best toy: John King and his Magic Map - the network actually calls it that - as though it was from some story by Roald Dahl. The weirdest moment of the night was when CNN beamed up a correspondent from Chicago, Star Trek-style.

CNN tried to trounce everyone else's punditorium by featuring nine - count 'em, nine - talking heads, in addition to their corps of anchors and reporters. Was the network fielding a baseball team or a highly voluble Supreme Court?

Change was a mantra during the campaign, so frequently uttered as to seem trite and hollow. But change is precisely what the American voters mandated yesterday, and it will be on the agenda for the next four years.