OBAMA WINS

Tomorrow the sun is going to come up in this country and less than 40 years after an African American was not allowed to use the same bathroom as a white person, sleep in the same hotel, ride on the same bus, go to the same school, less than 40 years later our nation showed the entire world why it is the greatest nation on earth and selected an African American as it’s 44th President. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was elected the nation's 44th president yesterday, riding a message of change and an inspirational exhortation of hope to become the first African American to ascend to the White House. Obama, 47, the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, led a tide of Democratic victories across the nation in defeating Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a 26-year veteran of Washington who could not overcome his connections to President Bush's increasingly unpopular administration. Obama became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to receive more than 50 percent of the popular vote, and he made good on his pledge to transform the electoral map. He overpowered McCain in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania -- four states that the campaign had spent months courting as the keys to victory. He passed the needed 270 electoral votes just after 11 p.m., with victories in California and Washington state.

The general-election campaign began with simple themes: Obama said McCain's candidacy represented nothing more than a continuation of the Bush administration, while McCain portrayed Obama as too inexperienced to lead a country involved in two wars and under the threat of terrorism. McCain offered his years of experience and his maverick record of often bucking the leadership of his party as evidence of the kind of president he would be, and characterized Obama as a man of eloquent speeches but empty rhetoric.

Obama shored up his perceived weaknesses with Biden, a longtime senator fluent in foreign affairs and national policy but prone to gaffes. But the decision was well-received, and Obama enjoyed a harmonious Democratic National Convention, where he was praised by his former rival for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.). He ended the convention with an acceptance speech before 75,000 at a football stadium in Denver, something no nominee had attempted since Kennedy in 1960.

Just a day later, McCain stepped on the Democrats' celebration with his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whom he described as a fellow outsider who would "shake up Washington." From the moment she was introduced, Palin made an appeal to women, but her chief asset seemed to be reenergizing the conservative GOP base of the party that for years had been skeptical of McCain. The weeks after the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., were the only ones in the long history of the campaign in which the party had enjoyed an advantage. But that ended as the nation's economy worsened.