He gets his first classified security briefing and accepts invitation from Bush to visit the White House. Fresh tallies give North Carolina to Obama while Democrats gain another Senate seat.

Reporting from Chicago -- As the scale of his mandate widened Thursday, Barack Obama began preparing for a rare wartime transfer of power, getting his first classified national security briefing, accepting an invitation to meet with President Bush next week and naming a White House chief of staff.

Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago congressman who is widely considered one of the Democratic Party's sharpest strategists, accepted Obama's offer to run the White House.

At the White House, the Bush administration is making plans for the transition. The Justice Department has already given security clearances to the president-elect's transition team.

Bush told his staff Wednesday to see to it that the Obama team hits "the ground running." The two men are to meet at the White House on Monday. On the agenda will be the Iraq war and the reeling financial markets.

"We face economic challenges that will not pause to let a new president settle in," Bush told Cabinet members and other White House staff gathered on the South Lawn. "This will also be America's first wartime presidential transition in four decades. We're in a struggle against violent extremists determined to attack us, and they would like nothing more than to exploit this period of change to harm the American people."

In a statement released by his campaign, Obama said: "Michelle and I look forward to meeting with President Bush and the first lady on Monday to begin the process of a smooth, effective transition. I thank him for reaching out in the spirit of bipartisanship that will be required to meet the many challenges we face as a nation."

Obama spent his second straight day since the election largely outside public view.

After a morning workout at a private gym, he got his security briefing at FBI offices in Chicago, then spent several hours in meetings at the Aon building. He returned calls to world leaders, including President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain.

When Obama left in the late afternoon, a reporter asked how his meetings went. Obama gave a one-syllable reply: "Good."

Today he is to hold his first news conference as president-elect after a meeting with a blue-chip cast of economic advisors. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is expected to take part by phone. Two former Treasury secretaries are to attend: Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, a top candidate for the same job in an Obama administration. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is also scheduled to take part.

Obama is expected to lead a discussion about the nation's troubling job losses and possible remedies. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has expressed support for passing a stimulus package in a lame-duck session of Congress. Obama's team does not appear to have reached consensus on that approach.

One Obama advisor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that it may be preferable to wait until the new president is sworn in before passing a stimulus package.

"Wait until the new president and the new team can put together a package that becomes a down payment on a broader investment agenda," the advisor said. "That would be my preference."

The top level of Obama's White House is already taking shape.

David Axelrod, Obama's campaign strategist and one of the architects of the victory Tuesday night, is expected to come in as a senior White House advisor. Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director, is expected to become White House press secretary.

Emanuel, who has three children between the ages of 8 and 11, hesitated before agreeing to be White House chief of staff. He told a Chicago TV station: "I have a lot to weigh -- the basis of public service, which I've given my life to, a career choice. And most importantly, what I want to do as a parent."

The president's top aide oversees his schedule and the White House operation. As the gatekeeper to the president, the job is one of the most powerful -- as well one of the most demanding -- in Washington.

The pick is an intriguing one. As Washington resumes go, Emanuel's is impressive. He was a top advisor to President Clinton. In just five years, he rose to become the fourth-ranking House Democrat as head of the party's caucus.

But Emanuel, 48, is also one of the toughest operatives in American politics, known for cutting oratory and partisan tactics. He alienated some Republicans while vaulting the Democrats back to power in the 2006 elections.

Grover Norquist, a conservative who heads Americans for Tax Reform, said of Emanuel: "Rahm is a rather bitter person. And he's from Chicago. The challenge and concern about an Obama presidency was always that it would import Chicago traditions and values to D.C. Do you really want the federal government run the way Chicago city government is run?"

On the other side of the aisle, Howard Paster, a colleague of Emanuel in the Clinton White House, said in an interview: "One of the issues for a president is, do I pick someone with whom I have a good relationship, or someone who knows his way around Washington? President-elect Obama had an opportunity to pick someone who meets both criteria."

Paster said that Republicans are judging Emanuel only by his role as a vigorous political adversary.

"That was his job," he said. "They forget that when he was in the White House, he helped Bill Clinton build relationships with uniformed police officers and police on the streets and was never seen as one of the more liberal influences in the Clinton White House."




By Peter Nicholas and Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2008

In his Tuesday night acceptance speech, President-elect Barack Obama appropriately offered "thank-yous" to his family, campaign aides and voters who supported the Democratic ticket.

Now he may be dashing off thank-you notes to others who helped bring about his electoral college landslide. Here's hoping his list includes:

* Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. The allegiance of Obama's Democratic party allies should be measured against the standard: "BATK" (Before or After Tim Kaine.) Kaine endorsed Obama in February 2007, far in advance of most Congressional Black Caucuc members and statewide elected officials outside of Illinois.

* Bill and Hillary Clinton. Obama could not have asked more of the Clintons. Despite her bitter defeat in the race for the party's presidential nomination, they went all-out for Obama, urging disappointed supporters to get behind the Democratic ticket. The Clintons should be thanked for that. But there's another reason to thank them.

Obama wouldn't be set to become the nation's 44th president were it not for the toughening-up he got from the Clintons in the primaries. Everything was thrown at Obama: his inexperience and questionable associations, his so-called oratorical skills vs. a lack of substance, his supposed unreadiness to become commander in chief -- charges that were also used by John McCain in the general election race.

By the time Obama locked horns with the GOP attack machine, he was battle-tested. For that, he owes the Clintons a special thank-you.

* The Commission on Presidential Debates. The debate formats -- one devoted exclusively to foreign policy and another to domestic policy, and a third using a town-hall-meeting style -- gave Obama the opportunity to demonstrate his command of the issues and to show that he could coolly and ably defend his positions in a face-off with the more senior McCain. The debates elevated Obama's presidential stature -- and took McCain down a peg or two.

* The Rev. Jeremiah Alvesta Wright. In Liberty Baptist church, my childhood place of worship, I heard it preached: "Sometimes a stumbling block can be a steppingstone in disguise."

Wright, Obama's former pastor, may have fulfilled that wise saying. Without Wright's fiery and controversial sermons, short segments of which were repeatedly aired in the media, Obama would not have delivered his "A More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia.

The whole affair allowed Obama to address head-on the elephant in the room -- race. Obama did it with candor and a sensitivity that reflected an insightful understanding of this American dilemma. It was a rare and reassuring performance by a presidential hopeful.

* The U.S. Secret Service. The number of threats against Obama is kept confidential, but I'm reliably told it is huge. It's no secret that there are people who would harm him if they could. That Obama is on his way to the White House is a tribute to the men and women who, 24-7, put their lives and limbs between him and harm. They can't be thanked enough.

* Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. As a motivational strategy, coaches often post in locker rooms any nasty pre-game comments made by opposing players. O'Reilly and Hannity gave to Obama supporters plenty of fighting words.

Night after night, Hannity and O'Reilly, courtesy of their prime-time cable broadcasts, found new ways to get the juices of the Obama faithful flowing. The Fox channel was the bulletin board that conveyed the ugly remarks that motivated Obama's supporters to hand out more literature, work the phones, canvass door to door and vote by the millions.

* Katie Couric. A thank-you note from Obama might embarrass the CBS News anchor, since her interviews with GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin was strictly a journalistic pursuit and not an effort to boost the Democratic presidential ticket.

The Couric-Palin interviews, though hardly the equivalent of the Wall Street meltdown, were excruciating to watch. They sent McCain's claim to good judgment up in flames.

Perhaps a thank-you note to Couric isn't in order. But a knowing smile the next time Obama sees her might do the trick.

* Soul-searching Republicans. They are trying to figure out what went wrong. The emerging consensus: Republican candidates strayed from their core principles of fiscal conservatism and small government. Cramped thinking of that sort ensures the Republican party's minority status.

Roll the tape for a larger picture of the problem -- and a glimpse of what lies ahead: Scan the faces of delegates to the Republican and Democratic conventions, as well as the McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden campaign crowds. Examine the demographic results in Tuesday's election.

Now consider the U.S. Census Buresu's population projections.

If the GOP does not become more inclusive and open to new ideas, it could take on the image (not the ideology) of F.W. De Klerk's now disbanded National Party of South Africa.

If that happens, Obama can thank narrow-minded Republican strategists.

I'm out of space, and the darn list keeps growing.

By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post, November 9, 2008

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

My assistant, Jean Hwang, and I have been examining Post coverage since Nov. 11 last year on issues, voters, fundraising, the candidates' backgrounds and horse-race stories on tactics, strategy and consultants. We also have looked at photos and Page 1 stories since Obama captured the nomination June 4. Numbers don't tell you everything, but they give you a sense of The Post's priorities.

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Post reporters, photographers and editors -- like most of the national news media -- found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that.

McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, and Obama won his on June 4. From then to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.

Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos. In black and white photos, the nominees were about even, with McCain at 149 and Obama at 147. On Page 1, they were even at 26 each. Post photo and news editors were surprised by my first count on Aug. 3, which showed a much wider disparity, and made a more conscious effort at balance afterward.

Some readers complain that coverage is too poll-driven. They're right, but it's not going to change. The Post's polling was on the mark, and in some cases ahead of the curve, in focusing on independent voters, racial attitudes, low-wage voters, the shift of African Americans' support from Clinton to Obama and the rising importance of economic issues. The Post and its polling partner ABC News include 50 to 60 issues questions in every survey instead of just horse-race questions, so public attitudes were plumbed as well.

The Post had a hard-working team on the campaign. Special praise goes to Dan Balz, the best, most level-headed, incisive political reporter and analyst in newspapers. His stories and "Dan Balz's Take" on washingtonpost.com were fair, penetrating and on the mark. His mentor, David S. Broder, was as sharp as ever.

Michael Dobbs, the Fact Checker, also deserves praise for parsing campaign rhetoric for the overblown or just flat wrong. Howard Kurtz's Ad Watch was a sharp reality check.

The Post's biographical pieces, especially the first ones -- McCain by Michael Leahy and Obama by David Maraniss -- were compelling. Maraniss demystified Obama's growing-up years; the piece on his mother and grandparents was a great read. Leahy's first piece on McCain's father and grandfather, both admirals, told me where McCain got his maverick ways as a kid -- right from the two old men.

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

The Post had good coverage of voters, mainly by Krissah Williams Thompson and Kevin Merida. Anne Hull's stories from Florida, Michigan and Liberty Iniversity, and Wil Haygood's story from central Montana brought readers into voters' lives. Jose Antonio Vargas's pieces about campaigns and the Internet were standouts.

One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama's running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission. However, I do not agree with those readers who thought The Post did only hatchet jobs on her. There were several good stories on her, the best on page 1 by Sally Jenkins on how Palin grew up in Alaska.

In early coverage, I wasn't a big fan of the long-running series called "The Gurus" on consultants and important people in the campaigns. The Post has always prided itself on its political coverage, and profiles of the top dogs were probably well read by political junkies. But I thought the series was of no practical use to readers. While there were some interesting pieces in The Frontrunners series, none of them told me anything about where the candidates stood on any issue.

By Deborah Howell, The Washington Post, November 9, 2008

CHICAGO - President-elect Barack Obama approached the lectern Friday for his first news conference since winning the election. He smiled as he looked out at a large retinue assembled from around the world, and paused for a moment before saying, "Oh wow."

With that, Mr. Obama began the first nationally televised appearance of his new role. Since Election Day, he had been seen only in faraway shots as he dashed from the gym or walked to a meeting. But when he arrived at a hotel ballroom here, flanked by a team of economic advisers, Americans caught their first glimpse of the 44th president at work.

"I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead," Mr. Obama said, his voice slow and controlled. "Some of the choices that we make are going to be difficult. And I have said before and I will repeat again: It is not going to be quick and it is not going to be easy for us to dig ourselves out of the hole that we are in."

Mr. Obama called on Congress and the Bush administration to pass an economic stimulus package. If an agreement cannot be reached this month in the lame-duck Congressional session, he said, it will be his chief goal when he takes office on Jan. 20.

He said it was an "urgent priority" to extend unemployment insurance benefits for workers who could not find jobs in the bleak economy. He also said he would give aid to states, create new jobs and move forward with his tax-cut plans for middle-class families.

The session was limited to about 20 minutes, and Mr. Obama took nine questions. His answers were purposefully crisp - and, at times, laced with humor - and his presentation stood in contrast to previous news conferences, where he would often devote much more time to a question.

Mr. Obama fielded a variety of questions, including one about the kind of dog he would get for his two daughters in the White House. ("Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me," he said.) He said that he was studying the writings of Abraham Lincoln and that he had spoken to previous presidents.

"I've spoken to all of them that are living," Mr. Obama said. "I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any seances."

A few hours later, Mr. Obama was on the telephone with Mrs. Reagan to "apologize for the careless and offhanded remark." A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, Stephanie Cutter, said he and Mrs. Reagan had a warm conversation.

But the overall tone of the news conference reflected the challenges Mr. Obama faces.

Mr. Obama said he would defer to President Bush and his economic team on major decisions in the next 74 days, saying, "The United States has only one government and one president at a time."

He pledged to find ways to help the struggling automobile industry and invited Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan to join his economic advisory board.

Mr. Obama, who stood a few feet in front of an array of economic advisers as well as Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Representative Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff, offered no new specifics about what he intended to do to curb the economic crisis. But the stagecraft of the news conference, held after a closed-door meeting of Mr. Obama's economic advisers, was intended to show that he was hard at work in search of solutions.

Mr. Obama offered little guidance on how he wanted the Treasury Department to carry out the $700 billion government plan to stabilize the financial markets, saying only that he would review any decisions made by the Bush administration. He suggested that he intended to move ahead with his campaign pledge to take away tax cuts for upper-income Americans, but seemed to leave a narrow window of room to adjust his proposal.

"I think that the plan that we've put forward is the right one," Mr. Obama said when asked if the wealthiest Americans would pay more taxes next year. "But obviously over the next several weeks and months, we're going to be continuing to take a look at the data and see what's taking place in the economy as a whole."

Mr. Obama's imprecise campaign pledges have caused some confusion about when he would repeal the Bush tax cuts on Americans making more than $250,000 a year.

The tax cuts, by law, are set to expire at the end of 2010, but Mr. Obama has said he will repeal them sooner and use the revenues to offset the costs of his health care plan. He left unclear whether a tax bill signed into law next year would make the repeal effective retroactively for all of 2009 as well as 2010.

In the days before the election, Mr. Obama's economic advisers said he would not propose retroactive repeal, but would make it effective Jan. 1, 2010. But Mr. Obama did not say that during the campaign, even as his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, repeatedly criticized him as proposing to raise taxes immediately, in an economic downturn. Mr. Obama did not clarify his intentions Friday.

The news conference was held in a windowless ballroom of the Hilton Chicago, only steps from Grant Park, where Mr. Obama delivered his victory speech on election night. The session carried the trappings of an official event, with eight American flags lined against blue drapes, and a freshly made seal on the lectern: "The Office of the President Elect."

Asked how he would respond to the letter of congratulations from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Mr. Obama said he would review the letter and respond in an appropriate fashion. He said any nuclear ambitions by Iran were "unacceptable."

Mr. Obama seemed at ease, smiling more than he did during many stretches of his presidential campaign. When Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times rose to ask a question, Mr. Obama asked why her arm was in a sling.

"I cracked my shoulder running to your speech on election night," Ms. Sweet said.

"Oh, no," Mr. Obama replied with a smile. "I think that was the only major incident during the entire Grant Park celebration."

Mr. Obama is spending the weekend in Chicago, aides said, hoping to get a brief respite after a 22-month campaign. But his transition team was still working to put together a national security team in relatively short order.

Two advisers said Friday that a possible candidate for secretary of state was former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a confidant of Mr. Obama.




By Jeff Zeleny, The New York Times, November 7, 2008

WASHINGTON - President-elect Obama will enter office with an immediate opportunity to begin shaping the federal courts by filling four dozen openings on trial and appeals courts.

Federal judges, with lifetime appointments, can be a president's most enduring legacy. President Bush receives uniformly high marks from Republicans, even those who criticized him on other issues, for his selection of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Public attention typically is focused on the Supreme Court, where five justices are older than 70. Speculation about a possible opening centers on 88-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, but any retirement is unlikely before the summer, if then.

By contrast, 14 seats are open on appeals courts or will be by the end of January. Democratic appointees are a majority on only one of the 13 federal appeals court, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

These are the courts that as a practical matter have the final say on everyday issues that affect millions of people because the Supreme Court accepts less than 2 percent of the cases appealed to the justices.

"Most of the action is in the lower courts, from labor and employment law to civil rights to punitive damages to affirmative action and how the death penalty is administered," said Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.

The traditionally conservative 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., is the first court on which Obama can change the balance of power quickly. It has four openings and is divided now between five judges appointed by Republican presidents and five named by Democrat Bill Clinton.

Covering Maryland, the Carolinas and Virginia, the 4th Circuit hears a large share of national security and intelligence cases because Virginia is the home of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Shapiro estimates that within four years, Obama can name enough judges to give Democrats majorities on nine of the 13 appeals courts.

Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, has complained that Bush appointees have been more likely to rule in favor of executive authority, businesses in their disputes with workers and consumers, and limiting access to the courts.

Judges appointed by Obama can be expected to side more often with "workers, consumers, homeowners, women and people of color who were discriminated against," Aron said.

With Democrats holding a solid majority in the Senate, at least for the next two years, Obama is not likely to have trouble getting his appointees confirmed. Bush and Clinton both struggled with the Senate when it was under the control of the opposition party for parts of their presidencies.

Some of the openings have existed for years, a result of Senate rules that give individual senators wide power to block nominees. In other cases, Bush has moved slowly to fill openings or Democrats have objected to the conservative backgrounds of his choices.

Among the appeals court seats to be filled are those vacated by Roberts in 2005 and Alito in 2006 when they were elevated to the Supreme Court.

Even when Clinton had a Democratic Senate majority in his first two years as president, he was slow to nominate judges, although an unexpected early retirement announcement by Supreme Court Justice Byron White partly accounted for the delay in moving other nominations.

The incoming Obama administration is unlikely to repeat that mistake, in part because of the experience of high-ranking officials beginning with Vice President-elect Joe Biden, a senator from Delaware who served 32 years on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Biden was chairman of the committee, which reviews judicial appointments, during the explosive debates over Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991. He led the committee for eight years and was its top Democrat for eight more during Democratic and Republican presidencies.

"This presidential team has more experience and expertise on these issues than any in history," said Doug Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center. "You'd expect this is something they will get right."

Conservatives tried to make a campaign issue of the potential for Democrats to remake the federal judiciary under Obama after Republican administrations since 1981 installed many young, right-leaning judges.

Even on the Supreme Court, where the justices often divide 5-4 on ideologically charged issues, seven justices were appointed by Republicans.

The court's two oldest justices, Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 75, are considered the most likely to retire soonest, yet both have hired law clerks for the next court term that begins in 11 months - a signal they might be planning to stay.

Curt Levey, executive director of the conservative Committee for Justice, is worried about the prospect of two Obama terms. He has said that there is a 75 percent chance that Obama eventually will have the chance to replace not only several liberal justices, but also the older conservative justices as well and create a liberal majority.

He pointed out that in this "unsettling scenario" Justices Antonio Scalia and Anthony Kennedy both would turn 80 in the final year of a hypothetical second Obama term and one or the other is likely to retire by then.

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press, November 8, 2008

The 2008 presidential election saw the biggest partisan shift in a generation - more of a rejection of Republicans than an embrace of Democrats - but voter surveys find no broad ideological realignment behind that shift.

Democrats made up 39 percent of the electorate and Republicans 32 percent in a national exit poll for The Associated Press and television networks. That left the share of voters considering themselves members of the GOP lower than in any presidential election since 1980 and was a sharp contrast with the 37-37 split between the two parties in the 2004 election.

But there was virtually no change in the ideological spectrum: This year 22 percent called themselves liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2004; 44 percent moderate, compared with 45 percent; and 34 percent conservative, same as four years ago. Since at least 1992, liberals consistently have comprised 20 percent to 22 percent of the electorate, while the conservative and moderate numbers have been a little more volatile.

The figures suggest that despite Tuesday's broad victory for Obama and Democrats in Congress, voters nationally have not shifted significantly leftward - something Democrats may bear in mind as they take full control of government in January eager to reshape federal policy.

Then again, some voters can't be pigeonholed by ideology. For instance, one in five self-described conservatives voted for Obama. One in 10 liberals voted for Republican John McCain.

And on a broad philosophical measure, 51 percent said government should do more to solve problems, the first time even a narrow majority said so since exit pollsters started asking the question in 1994. In a likely reaction to the global financial shock this fall, only 43 percent said government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals, down from 49 percent in 2004 and a high of 56 percent during the 1994 midterm elections.

National pre-election polls had presaged the change in partisanship, which is known to follow broader trends - in this case, the precipitous plunge in President Bush's job approval ratings, the economic crisis and other factors after the GOP controlled the White House for eight years.

With huge samples - nearly 18,000 voters this year - sampling error on the national exit polls is plus or minus just 1 percentage point.

___

What if it had been Hillary?

There's no way to be sure, but she might have won by even more than Obama did.

Voters in the Obama-McCain race said they would have preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton over McCain by 51 percent to 41 percent, a larger margin than Obama's 53-46 win.

Among the differences: Women say they would have backed Clinton over McCain by 18 percentage points, bigger than Obama's 12-point advantage with them. Whites favored McCain over Obama by 12 points but leaned toward the Republican by a narrower 5 points against Clinton. Eighty-six percent of blacks would have backed Clinton - solid, but shy of the 95 percent who supported Obama. Clinton almost matched the two-thirds of people under age 30 who voted for Obama, but nearly one in 10 of them said they wouldn't have bothered voting at all.

___

Do Obama and McCain supporters live in parallel universes? Not quite, but here are some differences between them:

- Nearly a quarter of Obama's voters were under age 30, almost double the share of McCain's.

- Ninety percent of McCain's voters and 61 percent of Obama's were white.

- A quarter of Obama's backers and 1 percent of McCain's were black.

- Half of McCain's voters attend religious services weekly or more, compared with a third of bama's.

- Almost six in 10 of Obama's voters are in worse financial shape than four years ago, double the number of McCain's.

- About six in 10 of McCain's voters have a gun in their household, twice the rate of Obama's.

___

How Obama's coalition views some top issues, and how their opinions differed from McCain's:

- Six in 10 of Obama's voters are very worried about the economy's direction, compared with four in 10 of McCain's.

- Three-quarters of Obama's voters worry about affording health care, while fewer than six in 10 of McCain's do.

- Nine in 10 of Obama's voters oppose the Iraq war, as do three in 10 of McCain's.

- Nearly all McCain's backers favor drilling for oil off U.S. shores, while Obama's are split about evenly.

- Six in 10 of Obama's voters think race relations will improve in the next few years, double the number of McCain's who say so.

By MIKE MOKRZYCKI and CORALIE CARLSON, Associated Press, November 8, 2008

NEW YORK - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her first public appearance since former rival Barack Obama was elected president, praised his choice for White House chief of staff, a former top aide to her husband.

"President-elect Obama made an excellent choice," she said of Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, adding that he "understands both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue."

"He gets things done," she said at a news conference Thursday night before she and former President Clinton were honored at a gala at the newly refurbished Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. "Rahm is determined and effective."

She also called on Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, to resign after he was convicted of corruption charges.

The event at which the Clintons spoke kicked off the opening weekend of the Intrepid after a nearly two-year restoration. President Bush next week will deliver a Veterans Day address on the famous World War II aircraft carrier.

Clinton, a New York Democrat, said she talked with Obama after his historic victory, which made the Illinois senator the first African-American elected to the White House, and promised to work with him as he faces challenging times taking office.

"I want to be a good partner with him in the Senate," said Clinton, his former rival for their party's presidential nomination. "The Senate is going to be the place that determines whether his agenda is successful. We are going to work together. We are going to work across the aisle."

Clinton said that Obama has to move quickly on national security and the economy. He was wise to begin preparing for his transition into the White House, she said.

"I give him credit for being ahead of the curve," she said. "I think he'll put together a good team."

Asked whether she would join an Obama administration, Clinton said: "I want to be the best senator I can be from New York."

Stevens, who has secured billions of dollars in federal funds for his state, was clinging to a narrow lead in a re-election bid after being found guilty of lying on Senate records to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in home renovations and gifts he received from a millionaire businessman. He is appealing and told voters he's not a convicted felon - at least not until the appeal process is over.

But Stevens, Clinton said, has to go.

"I think that he should step down, and I think that we may actually win that seat still," she said.

An exit poll and incomplete ballot results had Stevens, a 40-year incumbent, with a very slight lead over Democratic rival Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage. More than 60,000 absentee and questioned ballots remained to be counted Thursday, so the outcome may be days in coming.

By ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press, November 6, 2008

Latino voters shifted in huge numbers away from the Republicans to vote for Senator Barack Obama in the presidential election, exit polls show, providing the votes that gave him unexpectedly large margins of victory in three battleground states: Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

Mr. Obama's pull on Latino voters also extended to Florida, where a majority of them voted for a Democratic presidential nominee for the first time since at least 1988, when exit polls were first conducted in the state.

In a year when turnout among many groups surged nationwide, the number of Latinos who went to the polls increased by nearly 25 percent over 2004, with sharp rises among naturalized immigrants and young, first-time voters, according to a study by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Hispanic support for the Democratic nominee increased by 14 points over all compared with 2004, the biggest shift toward the Democrats by any voter group.

For the first time, Latino voters emerged as a mobilized Democratic voting bloc in states across the country, Latino officials said.

"They really delivered," said Efrain Escobedo, director of civic engagement at the Latino officials' association, a bipartisan group that ran voter registration drives across the country. "This is an electorate that now understands the importance of voting, and they made a significant shift in the political landscape."

Nationwide, Hispanics voted 67 percent for Mr. Obama and 31 percent for Senator John McCain, according to Edison/Mitofsky exit polls. In 2004, Senator John Kerry won 53 percent, while 44 percent of Hispanics voted for President Bush, a record for Latino support for a Republican presidential nominee.

The approximately 10 million Latinos who went to the polls this year were 9 percent of the total of voters, up one percentage point from 2004. Their share of the electorate did not increase more substantially because turnout was high across most voting groups.

A striking increase was in Colorado, where Hispanics went from 8 percent of those who voted in 2004 to 13 percent this year, according to Edison/Mitofsky. Mr. Obama carried the Latino vote in Colorado by 61 percent to 38 percent, Edison/Mitofsky found.

While Mr. McCain campaigned hard in Colorado and polls showed a tight race there, in the end Mr. Obama won the state by 7.7 percentage points.

Latinos were also crucial to Mr. Obama's landslide in New Mexico, which, like Colorado, went for President Bush in 2004. Hispanics increased their share of New Mexico's voters to 41 percent, from 32 percent in 2004, and 69 percent of them voted for Mr. Obama, who carried the state by more than 14 points.

"The Latino vote came back to the Democratic Party after a brief flirtation with the Republicans," said New Mexico's Democratic governor, Bill Richardson, who is Hispanic. "They turned out, erasing the fame of Latino voters as a sleeping giant and making them an actual giant."

Mr. Richardson said Latinos had been attracted to the Democratic nominee because he "spoke to them not as an ethnic group but as American voters pursuing the American dream, focusing on mainstream issues like the economy and the war in Iraq."

In Nevada, where Hispanics were 15 percent of voters, 76 percent of them backed Mr. Obama. He carried the state by more than 12 points.

In Florida, Hispanics joined many other groups in shifting away from the Republicans toward Mr. Obama, contributing to his 2.4-point victory there. One factor was a growing group of Puerto Rican voters in Central Florida, who tended to vote Democratic while South Florida's large Cuban-American population remained dependably Republican, said Mark Hugo Lopez, a researcher for the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

By Julia Preston, The New York Times, November 6, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama succeeded in chiseling off small but significant chunks of white evangelical voters who have been the foundation of the Republican Party for decades, a close look at voting patterns reveals.

The change reflects a broader shift among religious voters in every category. Mr. Obama made gains among Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants, compared with the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

But the big question was whether Mr. Obama could appeal to evangelicals - born-again Christians, who make up about a quarter of the electorate and have been largely Republican stalwarts.

Early in the campaign, he mobilized a team led by the Rev. Joshua DuBois, a Pentecostal pastor, who focused on reaching out to politically moderate evangelicals, Catholics and mainline Protestants.

"The Obama campaign really made a decision to target their efforts to moderates," said Mara Vanderslice, founder and director of the Matthew 25 Network, a political action group that ran advertisements on Christian radio for Mr. Obama. "Their plan was never to go after people who'd been voting Republican for 20 years."

"There never was an aggressive outreach effort to white Southern Baptist evangelicals in the South; that wasn't the focus," added Ms. Vanderslice, an evangelical Christian who was Mr. Kerry's director of religious outreach.

Campaign workers contacted individual ministers, even those they knew would not necessarily vote for Mr. Obama, and mailed copies of his speeches on faith and politics to thousands of them.

For some, the campaign arranged meetings or phone calls with Mr. Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois. The goal, organizers said, was to humanize him as a person of genuine faith, so that even those pastors who opposed him would be hesitant to attack him publicly.

The campaign also visited about 10 Christian colleges in swing states, often staging events with Donald Miller, a bestselling author popular with younger evangelicals and an Obama supporter. And campaign workers organized more than 900 "American values house parties," in which Obama supporters invited members of their church to talk politics.

The payoff was both generational and geographic. Mr. Obama doubled his support among young white evangelicals (those ages 18 to 29) compared with Mr. Kerry. The increase was almost the same for white evangelicals ages 30 to 44.

"There is definitely a generational division," said David P. Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and author of "The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center."

"Young evangelicals," Dr. Gushee said, are "attracted to a broader agenda" beyond abortion and homosexuality, that includes the environment, poverty, human rights and torture.

Nationwide, most white evangelicals remained in the Republican camp despite misgivings they voiced about the depth of Senator John McCain's commitment to a conservative social agenda. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, held 74 percent of the white evangelical vote, compared with 24 percent for Mr. Obama - a gain of only three percentage points over Mr. Kerry.

But in most of the swing states where Mr. Obama's campaign concentrated, like Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia, his gains over Mr. Kerry in 2004 among white evangelicals were larger.

Mr. Obama improved his standing by 10 points among white evangelicals in Colorado. The state is home to what many consider to be the capitol of evangelical America, Colorado Springs, where dozens of conservative megaministries like Focus on the Family have their headquarters and employ tens of thousands of people.

He also did well with Catholics, who make up about a quarter of the American electorate, winning 54 percent of that vote compared with 45 percent for Mr. McCain. Most of the Catholic boost for Mr. Obama came from Hispanic Catholics, who are now 6 percent of the electorate.

Mr. Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination, managed to increase his share of the Catholic vote by seven percentage points over Mr. Kerry, who is a Catholic.

By Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times, November 6, 2008

The world looks anew at its sole superpower. For the past several years America's most formidable adversary has not been al-Qaeda, North Korea or Iran. The strategic threat to US power has come from rising anti-Americanism. The election of Barack Obama has disarmed it.

Mr Obama's victory this week was no less astonishing for the fact that it was widely predicted by the opinion polls. Everywhere, we have heard the sound of doors slamming on the past; on the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation; on a Republican ascendancy born of the struggle over civil rights and Vietnam; on the Reagan era of unfettered markets; and on the world's deepening disenchantment with Washington.

There are caveats, of course. It should be obvious to all that expectations of Mr Obama are impossibly high. Even so singular a politician will struggle to make the transition from the soaring poetry of the campaign to the workaday prose of government.

Rhetoric will not fix the US economy; or save the planet from climate change. Eloquence will not get US troops out of Iraq; or the Taliban out of Afghanistan. For all that, the simple fact of Mr Obama's victory has changed the geopolitical game.

The world did not have a vote in the US election. It understood, though, that it had a vita interest in the outcome. John McCain had earned the respect of many leaders around the world. But among most electorates, a victory for the Republican candidate would have been greeted with a collective cry of anguish. Instead, many scores of millions have celebrated America's choice.

Some, in Mr Obama's phrase, were huddled around radios in "the world's forgotten corners". They see a president-elect of Kenyan ancestry; a politician whose character was formed by childhood years in Indonesia; and a man whose middle name bears testimony to his Muslim forbears.

Europeans see another Mr Obama. Black, certainly, but a product also of America's familiar east coast: intelligent, urbane and, above all, someone who shares their sensibilities about the necessary balance between power and persuasion in world affairs; Europe's kind of president.

There, you might say, lies Mr Obama's genius: abroad as well as at home, he has proved one of those rare politicians who invites others to discover in him their own priorities and preoccupations.

What his overseas admirers share is a sense that in choosing Mr Obama, the US has rediscovered the virtues and values that long underpinned its moral authority. In recent years, the anti-Bushism born of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo has hardened into visceral anti-Americanism. The election confounds the prevailing image (always something of a distortion) of a nation described only by its arrogance and indifference.

Global goodwill, like well-chosen words, will not solve America's or the world's problems. Tehran is not about to give up its nuclear ambitions nor Moscow its expansionism. Mr Obama takes office, though, with the space to win some of the arguments that were mostly lost by his predecessor even before they were joined.

One of the crueller ironies of George W. Bush's second term is that the president has listened to his critics. The failure of the military adventure in Iraq saw Mr Bush embrace many of the diplomatic strategies urged by his allies. That was evident in negotiations with North Korea and the diplomatic engagement with Iran.

But the effectiveness was blunted by the unshakeable legacy of the first term unilateralism. With Dick Cheney, the vice-president, hovering ever present in the wings, few have believed that the administration's motives could be anything but bad, its embrace of engagement anything but tactical. Mr Bush completely lost the benefit of the doubt.

That will change. It will no longer be possible (it should never have been so with Mr Bush) for America's adversaries to draw moral equivalence between the president of the world's most powerful democracy and tyrants, despots and terrorists everywhere: Mr Obama as the Great Satan?

In demonstrating the infinite capacity of the US to reinvent itself by rediscovering idealism, Mr Obama robs friend and foe of their alibis.

A week ago Moscow's latest threat to site its missiles on Poland's borders might have been greeted with a pained shrug: after all, Russia, many in Europe would have said, had been provoked by Mr Bush.

As it was, the sour response of Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, to Mr Obama's victory spoke to his own failure to grasp the significance of the event. Moscow has precious few friends even now. Henceforth it will find it a lot harder to hide its belligerence behind America's unpopularity. The same might be said of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and one or two others.

There is an important lesson here for Washington's allies, too. Mr Bush has been an excuse for inaction. Many Europeans have spent the past few years carping from the sidelines: the US has been messing things up everywhere, so why should they contribute anything to global security?

That excuse has gone. Before too long, these governments, long too comfortable in their inaction, will have to consider what they have to offer the incoming president in return for America's security guarantees.

Speaking in Chicago's Grant Park, Mr Obama offered his own story as an eloquent answer to the charge that the US has lost the idealism of its founding fathers. He might have added that a world, transfixed by his election victory, gave testimony to the continuing fact of American power. The US has been greatly weakened by Mr Bush's mistakes, but everyone else still looks to Washington to set their foreign policy compass.

That said, the shifting boundaries of geopolitics - the rise of great powers in Asia, the intractable threats from terrorism and nuclear proliferation - leave the US the insufficient, as well as the indispensable, power.

Mr Obama's promise of engagement and collaboration speaks to an intelligence that understands that America needs to gather its friends in order to defeat it enemies; and that the rules of the international system can be enforced on the weakest only if they are observed by the strongest.

The world may be disappointed. One of Mr Obama's most dangerous enemies will be the impatience of our age: the ever present demands that tomorrow's problems be fixed yesterday. Perhaps the new president will lack the decisiveness that is an essential partner to careful deliberation. But this is a moment for optimism. Once in a while, politicians do change the course of history.

By Philip Stephens, The Financial Times, November 6 2008

The Minnesota Senate race continues to tighten. Al Franken now trails Sen. Norm Coleman by just 336 votes -- and the race seems more likely than ever to go to a full manual statewide recount later this month.

ORIGINAL POST

Two days after the Nov. 4 election, the state of the Senate remains somewhat uncertain.

There are still three Senate races that remain either too close to call or headed for a recount/runoff, and two looming appointments for the seats currently held by Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

With so many questions still swirling around the World's Most Exclusive Club, we thought it might be a good idea to run down where things stand in each of these contests.

Alaska: Amazingly, Sen. Ted Stevens (R) looks as though he will be reelected to a seventh term over Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D). With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Stevens leads Begich 48.2 percent to 46.7 percent -- a margin of just less than 3,500 votes. Begich has yet to concede as 60,000 (or so) votes were cast early or absentee. If Stevens does get reelected, then the fun really begins. If Stevens resigns or is expelled from the chamber, a special election would be triggered within 60 to 90 days of the vacancy. But, state law is conflicted as to whether Gov. Sarah Palin (remember her?) would be allowed to appoint a senator in the interim or whether the seat would remain vacant until the special election.

Delaware: The obvious choice to replace Biden is his son Beau who is currently the Delaware attorney general. The problem? Beau is set to be deployed to Iraq for a year-long tour -- making his appointment impossible in the short term. It's possible outgoing Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D) could appoint herself as a caretaker until Beau Biden returns but that scenario carries risk as Rep. Mike Castle (R) is already preparing to run for the seat in the 2010 special election for the remaining four years on Biden's term. If Minner appoints herself or some other caretaker to buy time for Beau, it all but hands Castle a year-long head start.

Georgia: Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) is currently two-tenths of a percent short of the 50 percent vote share he needs to avoid a Dec. 2 runoff with former state Rep. Jim Martin (D). Ninety-nine percent of precincts are reporting and Martin has already said he is preparing for a runoff. Chambliss starts the runoff with a clear edge -- not only because of the fact that he won 100,000 more votes than Martin on Tuesday but also because it's hard to imagine Democrats will be able to recreate the turnout in the black community in early December.

Illinois: As we wrote earlier this month, the appointment of Obama's successor depends on the thinking of just one man: Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich, whose approval ratings are some of the worst in the country, is still mulling the possibility of seeking a third term in 2010 and his own political future is sure to factor into this pick. Among the names currently being mentioned: Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs head Tammy Duckworth, Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Jesse Jackson Jr., senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, outgoing state Senate President Emil Jones Jr. and Secretary of State Jesse White.

Minnesota: One of the longest and nastiest Senate races in the country, it going to go on a while longer. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Sen. Norm Coleman (R) is leading comedian Al Franken (D) by 437 (!) votes out of more than 2.4 million cast. Such a close margin will trigger a full statewide manual recount that won't begin until mid-November and might not conclude until next month. Coleman is declaring victory but the Associated Press has taken back their call of him as the winner and Democrats' attitude is that anything can happen in a statewide manual recount.

Oregon: State House Speaker Jeff Merkley (D) scored a narrow victory over Sen. Gordon Smith (R) in the Beaver State this morning. Merkley had slowly but surely expanded his vote totals over the last 24 hours and led by roughly 40,000 votes when the Associated Press called this race around noon eastern time. The race was far closer than many Democratic political operatives believed it would be but it now appears that Merkley has gone over the top.

By Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post, November 6, 2008

ANCHORAGE - Her last ride on the McCain-Palin campaign plane ended here, back home in the cold and the snow and the familiar.

"We are Alaskans!" Gov. Sarah Palin, standing with her husband Todd, told scores of cheering supporters who showed up to greet her upon her return to Alaska late Wednesday.

Standing on the icy tarmac on a subfreezing night, Ms. Palin said she had learned much about America in her time on the campaign trail with Senator John McCain. She also said she looked forward to getting back to her day job. She promised to work to expand development of Alaska's oil and gas resources and also to be a voice for families, like her own, that have children with special needs. She said she would "reach out" to Senator Barack Obama, the president-elect, on these issues and more.

"I just thank God for this opportunity that I have to be your governor," Ms. Palin said.

"You did so great out there," one woman in the crowd said. "We are so proud of you," read one sign. A chant gained volume, encouraging Ms. Palin to return to the national stage: "Two thousand twelve!"

Then Ms. Palin turned to speak to reporters. Once again, she asserted that the rumors of tension between her and Mr. McCain were not true. In fact, she said, they spoke by phone today during her layover in Seattle.

"We had a great relationship," she said, adding, "I love him."

One tough lesson she said she learned Outside, as Alaskans often call the rest of the country: the media is not always fair. At the same time, when she was asked why she had not given more interviews early in the campaign, she said, "I don't know, but did you ever hear that rumor of me going rogue? It was me trying to slip some phone calls to some of you guys. That was the rogueness."

Ms. Palin faces some complicated political dynamics now that she has returned. Some state Democrats, often her allies in the past, have been angered by her aggressive partisanship on the campaign trail. Then again, Ms. Palin has criticized some important local Republicans, too.

Last week, after Senator Ted Stevens was convicted on federal charges that he failed to disclose gifts and free home renovations he received, Ms. Palin joined Mr. McCain and other top Republicans in calling for him to resign. Yet while Ms. Palin lost her bid for the vice presidency, Mr. Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, holds a narrow lead in his bid for a seventh full term.

Asked Wednesday whether she still believed that Mr. Stevens should resign, Ms. Palin was circumspect, saying only that the people of Alaska "just spoke" on the issue at the ballot box and that "they want him as their senator." She said Mr. Stevens should decide "what happens next." (Mr. Stevens could still be forced to step down, and Ms. Palin is widely viewed as a potential candidate for his seat if he does.)

The governor took a few more questions, then turned back to the crowd of supporters and worked her last rope line under the supervision of media advisers to the McCain-Palin campaign and the Secret Service.

"This is the last time they'll be doing this for her," said Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the campaign, gesturing toward the wall of agents at Ms. Palin's back. "But for right now, she's still under protection."

By WILLIAM YARDLEY, The New York Times, November 6, 2008

Barack Obama argued for months that victory for his opponent would be akin to a third term for President Bush. But as he embarks on his own presidency, Mr. Obama faces the challenge of building an administration that does not look like a third term for former President Bill Clinton.

Introducing his first appointments as president-elect, Mr. Obama reached deep into the Clinton fold on Wednesday, naming John D. Podesta, a former White House chief of staff, to lead his transition team. He has asked another former Clinton aide, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, to be his own chief of staff and is said to be choosing between two other Clinton veterans for national security adviser.

Mr. Obama tried to balance his initial announcement by naming two co-chairmen to work with Mr. Podesta on the transition, and he will soon introduce other key advisers without any Clinton pedigrees.

But this is only the beginning of a delicate balancing act for Mr. Obama: between bringing a new generation of leadership to Washington as a signal of his commitment to his pledge to change politics, and recruiting, at a time of intense economic and national security challenges, from the biggest pool of Democrats with national executive branch experience.

The tension has already generated concern among the Obama aides who labored for two years to turn an underdog into a president, in part by beating Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York to win the Democratic nomination, only to watch him turn to the Clinton crowd when it comes time to stock a government.

As loyalists in his Chicago headquarters spent the final weeks of the campaign focused on finishing the election, they were deliberately kept away from the fledgling transition efforts begun by Mr. Podesta under Mr. Obama's direction in Washington.

"They're torn," a prominent Democrat close to the campaign said of Mr. Obama's advisers. "There's half of them that think, 'We're in the midst of a huge economic crisis; let's get the most experienced people out there.' The other half think, 'Hey, we're the change candidate.' "

As Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a Democratic-oriented advocacy group, put it: "The big question is how fresh Obama wants to look. The Clinton administration is going to be a black mark for a lot of these candidates - it will be for some and won't for others - just because he wants to look like his own man."

For Mr. Obama and the Clintons, this represents the next chapter in a relationship fraught with ambition, respect and resentment. As he battled Mrs. Clinton in the primaries, Mr. Obama made a point of distancing himself from her husband's administration, regularly disparaging what he saw as its defining traits: the politics of triangulation and governance by polls. By contrast, Mr. Obama praised Ronald Reagan as a transformational figure.

After Mr. Obama beat Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the two camps struggled to merge their operations and forge a utilitarian partnership to win back the White House. By the end of the campaign, the two sides appeared at last to have made their peace as both Bill and Hillary Clinton barnstormed key states for Mr. Obama. Now it is up to Mr. Obama to take over a Democratic Party dominated for the last 16 years by the Clintons.

As he looks to build a presidency from scratch, Mr. Obama recognizes that he needs at least some of the expertise of the Clinton circles, advisers said. Most telling was his decision even before the election to tap Mr. Podesta, founder and president of the Center for American Progress, a Washington group widely viewed as Mrs. Clinton's government-in-waiting until she lost.

Mr. Podesta put together an extensive team to plan for a possible Obama transition; not counting Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s representatives, all 10 members of the advisory board served in the Clinton administration. Still, some of them held relatively low-level positions in the Clinton era and were not identified so personally with the former president. And now Mr. Podesta is being joined by two co-chairmen, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse, who are both close to Mr. Obama.

Moreover, while Mr. Emanuel was a key aide to Mr. Clinton, he has also been a personal friend of Mr. Obama's from Chicago and at times has served as a bridge between rival camps. Some Clinton veterans under consideration for top jobs have been with Mr. Obama since the beginning of the primaries, having broken with the Clintons, including Gregory B. Craig, Susan E. Rica and Richard Danzig.

"We don't just want this to be sort of Clinton redux," said a senior Obama adviser involved in transition discussions. "There are plenty of good names out there, strong names that could say 'change.' "

The debate has already been joined over top economic and national security positions. Mr. Craig, who served as the State Department's director of policy planning under Mr. Clinton, and later as his impeachment trial lawyer, and James B. Steinberg, who was Mr. Clinton's deputy national security adviser, appear to be the top two contenders for national security adviser, key Democrats said. Ms. Rice may become the deputy, they said.

But Democrats appear split over the Treasury Department. Some are pressing for former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers to be brought back to help deal with the financial crisis, but several people close to the process said that would send the wrong signal. "You don't want to have Clinton's Treasury secretary," said one well-connected Democrat, himself a Clinton veteran. "This can't look like Clinton 3. He's got to put his own stamp on this."

At the same time, given the record of prosperity and budget surpluses in the Clinton era, tapping his economic team might be justified, some Obama advisers said. Other former Clinton White House aides whose names are being circulated for top economic posts in the Obama administration include Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Gener Sperling and Lael Brainard.

This, of course, is not the first time an incoming president has struggled to establish his own identity apart from his predecessors. William A. Galston, who was a policy adviser in Mr. Clinton's White House, recalled that the Clinton team after the 1992 election was leery of bringing in too many veterans of the last Democratic administration, headed by Jimmy Carter.

"Part of the Clinton transition team's aversion to Carter personnel was rooted in the sense that the Carter administration was less of a success at home and abroad," Mr. Galston said. The difference, he added, is that "Carter left office with a very low approval rating, while Bill Clinton left office with a very high approval rating."

By PETER BAKER, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

Bill Clinton brought jazz, Rhodes scholars, a slice of Arkansas and all-night pizza policy sessions. When George W. Bush arrived, Texans took over the town. Blue jeans were out; coats and ties and cowboy boots were in.

Now comes Barack Obama: young, hip and multicultural, with a Harvard law degree, a writer's sensibility and a smooth left-handed jump shot - not to mention two little girls who, America learned Tuesday night, will soon get a new puppy. His historic election brings political and generational change to the nation, but it also brings something else: cultural change in Washington, and a sense that the city's social fabric is about to be ripped up and restitched.

At weekend soccer games, parents wonder aloud which of the city's exclusive private schools might win the presidential sweepstakes by enrolling Malia and Sasha. (The Obamas could, of course, go the Jimmy Carter route and enroll their daughters in public school; Michelle Obama has said privately that she did not intend to make a decision about school until after the election.)

At the Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, the Rev. Robert Maddox Jr., a onetime Carter adviser, has already sent a letter inviting the Obamas to join. "We've gotten word from the grapevine that they will not decide where they go to church until they get in and settled a bit," he said. "But they will obviously be looking for a place where their girls can be involved."

This city has had eight years of a president who goes to bed at 9 p.m.; Laura Bush, the first lady, once said that she and Mr. Bush did not come to Washington to make new friends. A big night out on the town for the Bushes is dinner at Karl Rove's house. With the Obamas, the capital's hostesses are hoping to get back into high gear.

Yet the Democratic establishment here is still oriented around former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Just four years ago, Mr. Obama was a state senator from Illinois. After nearly two years on the campaign trail, he remains, here in Washington, an outsider, a virtual unknown.

"Is there anybody in Washington that really knows them? No, which is a very interesting thing,' Esther Coopersmith, who has raised millions for the Clintons and other Democrats, including Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the vice president-elect, said of the Obamas.

"He went home every weekend, or he went campaigning and was never here, and she lived in Chicago," she said.

So Washington is left to imagine what cultural tone the Obamas will set. Will Bruce Springsteen perform at the inaugural - or maybe Yo-To Ma? Will Mr. Obama make frequent use of the presidential box at the Kennedy Center? (Laura Bush often went, accompanied by friends, while her husband stayed home.) Or will the Obamas, whose idea of fun is playing board games with their daughters, be the type to stay in at night, helping the kids with their homework? Will Hollywood stars take up residence in the Lincoln Bedroom, the way they did during the Clinton years?

"He's a cool cat," said Christopher Buckley, the political humorist, "and I think he's going to bring cool catness back, if it ever existed at the White House."

Cool, maybe, but not too cool; during the course of his long campaign, Mr. Obama, wary of seeming too glamorous, took pains to make himself almost boring, a hint that his presidency may hew more closely to social convention than many people think. "They won't want to shock the nation," predicted Letitia Baldrige, who was White House social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy. "They'll want to be just quiet and dignified and conservative."

As for sports, the big question is whether the new president will install a basketball court at the White House. President Bush had T-ball games; will Mr. Obama bring B-ball to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? There are still 75 days to go until Inauguration Day, but members of the Washington Wizards, the city's N.B.A. team, are already dreaming.

"I want to play Obama one-on-one," Andray Blatche, the Wizards' 6'11" forward, declared after practice the other day. His teammate Caron Butler jumped in: "It'd be nice to go out there, shoot around with him, tour the White House."

When America elects a president, the country votes and moves on. When Washington gets a new president, the shift can be tectonic, changing ordinary lives in ways both profound and mundane.

Jobs change. The food changes. (Mr. Obama likes health food, although the O'Chili Bama Burrito has been selling briskly at California Tortilla, a Tex-Mex restaurant in town.) The real estate market goes boom - all those new Cabinet secretaries and White House staffers have to live somewhere, don't they? - even if the rest of the nation is in a bust.

At Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore with a progressive flair, Barbara Meade, a co-owner, said Mr. Obama was good for morale but bad for business. For one thing, the Bush administration as a subject made for lively book sales (Bob Woodward practically made a one-man industry of it). For another, Ms. Meade says, she expects some of her best customers to land jobs in an Obama White House.

"They won't have the time to read that they have now when they're on the outside," she said. "For us, we no longer feel like we're out in left field. We feel that we're in center field, that our culture will become the dominant culture of Washington."

On K Street, the city's lobbying corridor, Juleanna Glover, a Republican strategist and hostess to the city's younger set, is busy updating her Rolodex; how can you have a Washington party when hundreds of White House e-mail addresses are about to be defunct?

"I e-mailed a 3,000-person list; I probably got 800 bounce-backs, I probably got another 400 or 500 auto-replies - 'I'm out of the office until Nov. 5,' " Ms. Glover said. "I'm making the assumption that at least a third of those are Democrats, and most of those are going to be changing jobs, too."

Mr. Obama is no stranger to Washington society; when he arrived in January 2005 as the city's newest Democratic celebrity senator, he was quickly invited to white-tie events, at first attending only reluctantly. He has twice appeared at the Gridiron Club dinner, the annual affair that features journalists spoofing the people they cover. Still, some longtime denizens of Washington envision him abandoning some of the capital's stuffy old conventions.

"There's an older generation here that clings to, you know, the Gridiron Club and the White House Correspondents' dinner, and certain institutions," said Frank Mankiewicz, a longtime Democratic operative and former press secretary to Robert F. Kennedy. "We go to the Corcoran, the Smithsonian, the I. M. Pei Wing of the National Gallery. I have a feeling those things will diminish in importance, and other institutions will take their place."

Just what other institutions, Mr. Mankiewicz could not say. Like much of the rest of the city that is about to become the Obamas' new home, he will have to wait until Jan. 20 to find out.

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

NEW YORK (AP) - Former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are being honored Thursday night at a gala at the newly refurbished Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

Both Clintons are scheduled to speak at the event, which kicks off the opening weekend of the Intrepid after a nearly two-year restoration. Next week, President Bush will deliver a Veterans Day address on the famed World War II aircraft carrier.

It will be the Clintons' first public appearance since Barack Obama was elected president.

By ADAM GOLDMAN, The Associated Press, November 6, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House has been mostly a dog house when it comes to presidential pets. And President-elect Obama intends to keep it that way.

During the presidential campaign, Obama had promised his daughters a pet no matter the outcome of the election. He told them Tuesday night they'd be getting a pooch.

"I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House," Obama told Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, during his victory speech in Chicago.

As a Washington guessing game, trying to predict what breed of dog the Obamas will select doesn't rank up there with whom the president-elect will pick for his Cabinet, but anticipation about a new first dog is high nonetheless.

Will it be a Labrador racing around the White House grounds? Or something in the lapdog range? Perhaps something in-between. Pound puppy or purebred?

The poodle was the top choice for the Obamas in an American Kennel Club survey of more than 42,000 people, the organization said.

President Bush's two Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley, and cat, Willie, currently occupy the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Barney, who on Thursday bit a reporter's finger as he tried for an "interview," even has his own Web page on the White House Web site and stars in an annual Christmas video.

First pets have long been a tradition with first families. Dogs are among the most popular picks.

"If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog," Harry Truman once said.

George Washington got his dog, Vulcan, from the Marquis de Lafayette, a Revolutionary War hero, as a gift. James Garfield named his dog Veto as an indirect warning to Congress. Abraham Lincoln's beloved dog, Fido, was killed by a knife-wielding drunk.

The Kennedys had Marcaroni the pony. The Clintons had Buddy, a chocolate Lab, and Socks, a cat. President Clinton once told reporters the dog curled up with him when his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, wasn't home.

"He sleeps with me when Hillary's not here," the former president said. "He's my true friend. We have a great time."

Had Republican Sen. John McCain been elected on Tuesday, more than 20 pets, mostly fish, could have moved in.

Presidential pets are often attention grabbers in their own right.

The first President Bush's spaniel, Millie, had a best-seller, "Millie's Book, As Dictated to Barbara Bush," that outsold Bush's own memoirs.

Fala, Franklin Roosevelt's Scottish terrier, received more mail than many presidents. A statue of the pooch is also part of his presidential memorial in Washington.

"Ever since President Hoover there have been dogs at the White House who have been major photographic stars," says William Bushong, historian at the White House Historical Society and curator of their exhibit on White House pets.

Pets "are part of painting a whole picture of a president's life," says Bushong, and since we consider pet lovers to be people who are warm and giving, they can be good publicity. For example, Hoover's dog, King Tut, accompanied him in campaign photos, which improved his image with the public.

President Nixon's dog, Checkers, is credited with saving his political career.

In 1952, Nixon defended his candidacy for vice president when a story spread that he had a secret slush fund. In a nationally televised address, Nixon did admit to taking one "gift" — his dog.

"The kids love the dog, and we're going to keep it!" an emotional Nixon said in an outburst known to the day as the Checkers speech.

By ANN SANNER, The Associated Press, November 6, 2008

When Verna Williams called to congratulate Michelle Obama on Wednesday morning, she half-jokingly offered to stop calling her old law school buddy "Meesh" and start calling her something more dignified.

Mrs. Obama dissolved into giggles, and the two traded title ideas, one sillier than the next, all of them too ridiculous to repeat to a newspaper reporter, Ms. Williams said.

One day after the presidential election, the Obama family of Chicago's Hyde Park is only beginning to figure out how to become the first family of the United States.

As the first African-Americans in the role, they will be a living tableau of racial progress, and friends say they are acutely aware that everything they say and do - the way they dress, where Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7 , go to school, even what kind of puppy they adopt - will brim with symbolic value.

"Here's an intact black family, a happy family, with beautiful kids and a loving extended family," Ms. Williams said, "and they happen to live in the executive mansion."

For President-elect Barack Obama and his family, leaving Chicago means dismantling the protective cocoon they have built around them.

Throughout the campaign, Malia and Sasha, who will become the youngest White House occupants in decades, spent many hours in their grandmother's tiny South Side apartment, in the same building where their mother was raised. Their private school at the University of Chicago is laced with neighbors and allies who watch over the girls with loving vigilance.

When the girls and their mother have needed an escape, they could retreat to the backyards of longtime friends, where they jumped rope or turned up the volume on their iPods and danced with abandon to songs by Soulja Boy and Beyonce Knowles. Mrs. Obama, a creature of the South Side and of habit, has spent nearly every Saturday for the past 10 years with the same two friends and their collective brood of children, lately at a local California Pizza Kitchen where the group hashes over their weeks together.

Now all of that must change.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mrs. Obama spoke with the first lady, Laura Bush, who invited her and her daughters to visit the White House soon. The hunt for a new school begins now, Mrs. Obama told friends. In Hyde Park, she has a reputation as a fiercely attentive mother, one who watches Malia's footwork closely at soccer games while other parents drift and gossip over lattes. Friends say Mrs. Obama will apply the same scrutiny to her daughters' transition to Washington.

"Because she is Michelle," said Sandra Matthews, a friend from Chicago, "she will manage that, she will direct it," instead of relying on others to research schools.

As parents, the Obamas believe in giving their daughters some sway over decisions that affect them, she said. And so, note to headmasters: The preferences of Malia (pronounced mah-LEE-ah), a solemn-eyed harry Porter fan, and Sasha, the family ham, could weigh heavily. (Although the Obamas could send their daughters to one of the capital's public schools, which are in the midst of a major overhaul, many Washingtonians expect them to look closely at Georgetown Day School or Sidwell Friends, which Chelsea Clinton attended.)

While the Obama White House will surely entertain the usual Washington dignitaries and foreign heads of state, the most prized guests might be the girls' friends. "We may see sleepovers at the White House, groups of young girls in their sleeping bags hanging out with Sasha and Malia," Ms. Williams said.

Instead of trying to create an entirely new social world in Washington, friends predict that the Obamas will transport some of their Hyde Park world to the capital instead. On the campaign trail, they were accompanied by bands of relatives and friends: Craig Robinson, Mrs. Obama's brother; Martin Nesbitt, the campaign treasurer; Eric Whitaker, a hospital executive; and others. In part so the Obama girls could have familiar playmates, everyone brought their families along, too.

The attitude of the Obamas is "Come join us on this adventure," said John W. Rogers Jr., a finance company founder, who has done so a few times.

"I'm not letting go of this family," said Yvonne Davila, whose daughters are two of the Obama girls' best friends.

The Obamas will come to Washington with a fifth family member, one who has so far remained mostly out of the spotlight. Marian Robinson, Mrs. Obama's mother, is a widow and retired bank secretary who has served as the girls' chief caretaker during their mother's frequent absences. Aides say they do not yet know whether Mrs. Robinson will formally move into the White House, but it is certain that Malia and Sasha's grandmother will be near at hand and available when her parents have to travel.

"They are extremely close to their grandmother," Ms. Matthews said. "That's why Michelle has been able, with the ease and peace of mind, to be gone."

Once Mrs. Obama has settled her girls, she has said, she will move on to the matter of exactly what sort of first lady she wants to be. Although she dresses with unusual care - in both designer clothing and the off the rack styles she has become known for - friends say she has only a certain amount of patience for the domestic arts. She is a get-it-done-efficiently Rachael Ray type, they say, not given to elaborate Martha Stewart-like efforts.

As first lady, Mrs. Obama has said, she plans to make herself an advocate for working parents, particularly military families, urging better access to child care for all. Trying to juggle public duties with two young children, she will be a living illustration of the very issue she describes.

"She's going to be engaging in the balancing act herself," said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential historian.

But in one respect, the Obamas' family life will now become much easier. Since 1996, when he was elected to the Illinois State Senate, Mr. Obama has spent long periods away from home, and by his own admission, he is a part-time parent at best. The past six years have been a particularly punishing set of marathons, as he ran for a United States Senate seat, then spent weekdays in Washington, then traveled on the presidential campaign trail for nearly two long years.

His election will help realize a long-held, cherished family dream: For the next four years, the Obamas will finally eat dinner together.




By Jodi Kantor, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

PHOENIX - As a top adviser in Senator John McCain's now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse, the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue diplomacy.

As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin's schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms. Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president "maybe in eight years," was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain's that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain's concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.

"I think it was a difficult relationship," said one top McCain campaign official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. "McCain talked to her occasionally."

But Mr. McCain's advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin's political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.

The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.

For her part, Ms. Palin told reporters in Arizona on Wednesday morning that "there is absolutely no diva in me."

Later in the day, she refused to address the strife within the campaigns. "I have absolutely no intention of engaging in any of the negativity because this has been all positive for me," she said, adding that it was time to savor President-elect Barack Obama's victory and "not let the pettiness or maybe internal workings of a campaign erode any of the recognition of this historic moment."

As the ticketmate with a potentially brighter political future, Ms. Palin has more at stake going forward than Mr. McCain, whose aides now have an interest in blaming outside factors for their loss, making Ms. Palin a tempting target. And even as the votes from the election were still being counted, there were new recriminations, with Mr. McCain's aides suggesting that a Palin aide had leaked damaging information about them to reporters.

The tensions were described in interviews with top aides to the two campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as disloyal to Mr. McCain's effort at a difficult time.

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.

"Every book I've read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, et cetera," Mr. McCain said then. "And always the one that lost, 'Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.' So if I win, I believe that historians will say, 'Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.' If I lose," people will say, " 'That campaign, always in disarray.' "

The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee's $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin's lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain's campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain's concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain's closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain's top strategist.

On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin's image as an everywoman "hockey mom," bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin's family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.

The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.

Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.

"Those clothes, they are not my property," she said. "Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased."

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain's top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain's closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that "anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job."

Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain's advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a "whack job."

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, "a constant stream of poison" to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was "close to being out-and-out dysfunctional," said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

"I wasn't writing poison," Mr. Kristol said. He added: "Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign."

The McCain camp was further upset about Ms. Palin's interview with Ms. Couric, which was broadcast at a time when Ms. Palin was meeting with foreign leaders at the United Nations and trying to establish some foreign policy credentials. Ms. Palin's wobbly and tongue-tied performance was mocked in an iconic impersonation on "Saturday Night Live" by Tina Fey.

Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. "She did not say, 'I will not prepare,' " a McCain adviser said. "She just didn't have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded."

One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the election when news broke that Ms. Palin had taken a call made by Marc-Antoine Audette. Mr. Audette and his fellow comedian Sebastien Trudel are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.

Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good president some day. "Maybe in eight years," she replied.





By Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

One by one, prized Republican strongholds fell Tuesday night and yesterday. Ohio and Indiana, Florida and Virginia, Colorado and Nevada - all succumbed to Senator Barack Obama. And for conservatives it was as disorienting a day as any in the history of the movement that has been a dominant force in shaping modern American politics.

One thing was clear: the Republican Party was no longer the party of George W. Bush. But exactly whose party was it, and whose should it become? Senator John McCain never quite succeeded in presenting a coherent alternative version. Can someone else do better?

The answers that have emerged so far reflect the party's current confusion. A coalition once notable for its disciplined unity is now threatened by sectarian rifts that could widen significantly in the weeks ahead. Already, neoconservative defense hawks are pitted against isolationists, libertarian antitax brigades resist the values-driven politics of social conservatives, and the party's intellectuals operate at a growing remove from the base.

Consider the case of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. To some conservatives - including several scheduled to attend a brainstorming meeting in Virginia on Thursday - Ms. Palin represents the party's fresh-faced future. She personifies the values of small-town evangelicals, and her Western style lends piquancy to her populist mockery of Beltway elites and what she has called "the permanent political establishment."

And yet that establishment includes Republicans like Colin Powell, Mr. Bush's former secretary of state, and Kenneth M. Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's final White House chief of staff, both of whom voiced their dismay at Ms. Palin's presence on the ticket and declared their support for Mr. Obama shortly before Election Day.

Meanwhile, party operatives, crunching the unfriendly numbers, are rethinking the red state versus blue state election model mastered by tacticians like Karl Rove. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, wants the party to redirect its energies toward voters in the populous states of the Northeast and the Great Lakes region. James Greer, the Republican chairman of Florida, believes the party must adjust to changing demographics. "The party needs to focus on Hispanic voters and African-American voters," Mr. Greer told The New York Times. "It is the future of the Republican Party."

But the hunt for votes is only part of the problem. There is, more fundamentally, the question of what the two parties have to say and how they say it. Longstanding ideological debates, in particular, seem increasingly irrelevant and out of date.

It may well be that some of Mr. Obama's positions are to the left of the nation's at large - as Mr. McCain and others asserted time and again. But it may also be that most Americans do not much care. What seems to have impressed them is Mr. Obama's attunement to the problems afflicting the country and the hope he offered that they might be solved.

If so, then Republicans may have to jettison some of the most familiar items on their agenda. "The issues that have provided conservatives with victories in the past - particularly welfare and crime - have been rendered irrelevant by success," Michael Gerson, the Bush speechwriter turned columnist, wrote last week. "The issues of the moment - income stagnation, climate disruption, massive demographic shifts and health care access - seem strange, unexplored land for many in the movement."

In fact these "issues of the moment" have been with us for years now, decades in some instances, but until recently they were either ignored by conservatives or dismissed as the hobby-horses of alarmist liberals or entrenched "special interests."

The key word in Mr. Gerson's analysis is "movement," a term more applicable to moral or spiritual crusades than to the practical matters of governance, particularly governance in a two-party system, where success almost invariably requires compromise, consensus and a mind open to all manner of workable solutions.

These have not been, historically, the strength of "movement conservatives," who prefer arguments built on first principles often expressed in supercharged rhetoric. "Conservatives seem to have a genius for winning the all-important semantic battles," the policy thinker and journalist Richard N. Goodwin wrote in 1967. "Anti-union laws become 'right to work'; national health insurance becomes 'socialized medicine.' "

Some 40 years later, there are conservatives who still inveigh against the perils of socialized medicine. In the last weeks of the campaign, Mr. Obama was repeatedly labeled a "socialist" - a word all but emptied of meaning today when nations like China and Russia have lustily embraced the free market even as a Republican president proposes a $700 billion bailout of failing Wall Street firms. And yet even after Tuesday's results, some were still clinging to the old rhetoric. An Obama presidency will "deliver socialism, something too many of his supporters never saw coming," L. Brent Bozell, one of the expected participants in the Virginia meeting, wrote Wednesday on National Review online.

But if movement politics disdains nuance, its insistence on "core" principles lends steel to its adherents, who are inclined to regard all defeats, even major ones, as temporary setbacks.

This highlights a profound temperamental difference between the parties. The Democrats, more inclined in recent decades to pragmatism, have tended to bow to popular will even in close elections. President Bush, though he lost the popular vote in 2000 and though many believed that the Florida recount was unjustly halted by the Supreme Court, nonetheless had little trouble pushing his first initiatives through Congress, including one of the largest tax cuts in history.

When Mr. Reagan was elected in 1980, he probably stood farther to the right of the public of his time than Mr. Obama stands to its left today. Only two years before, in the Congressional election of 1978, Democrats held on to substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, despite the troubled leadership of President Jimmy Carter. And there was little tangible evidence that voters had embraced the supply-side economics that became a cornerstone of Reaganism.

But when Republicans achieved a slight majority in the Senate to go along with the Reagan landslide, Democrats, still in the majority in the House, accepted much of his agenda, in deference to the public's will and also in recognition that a new era in politics had arrived.

This history forms a telling contrast with 1992, when Bill Clinton amassed an impressive total of electoral votes, 370, and went to Washington with large majorities in the Senate and House. Owing to the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, Mr. Clinton received only 43 percent of the popular vote - still 5 percent higher than the incumbent, the first President Bush, and a more conclusive victory than the younger Mr. Bush achieved in 2004. But conservatives sensed weakness, and the Republican Senate leader at the time, Bob Dole, put Mr. Clinton on notice.

"He didn't get a majority," Mr. Dole said the next day. The country, he added, "had plenty of doubts about Clinton. They want change. Well, we want to be responsible and deliver change, whatever that means, but we're skeptical so we'll wait and see."

This set the tone for Mr. Clinton's presidency, which remained embattled for two terms. Mr. Dole repeatedly used the filibuster to thwart Mr. Clinton, and in his second term Mr. Clinton was locked in a war with Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House, who for a time appeared to be the dominant partner in their uneasy relationship.

Mr. Obama has an advantage: He attained both a majority of the popular vote and a strong electoral victory.

The topics scheduled for the conservative conference on Thursday, according to one participant, include a discussion of how to rebuild a "national grass-roots political and policy coalition" modeled on the one conservatives put together in the 1970s, when in the waning days of liberal hegemony, Beltway organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation extruded position papers, and publications like The Public Interest and Commentary became citadels of conservative ideology. Movements are conditioned to absorb setbacks and losses. Tuesday's election is the latest, and probably not the last. It has given the Republican Party a fresh challenge - one it has not shied from in the past.

By SAM TANENHAUS, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

JESSE JACKSON'S tears as he watched Barack Obama's victory speech said it all. The face of the aging civil rights leader - a man who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and twice ran for president himself - conveyed pride and amazement in Obama's accomplishment.

It was also a reminder that Obama's victory closes the curtain on the old civil rights movement. A new era began with the election of America's first black president.

The feeling of being witness to a very special moment in American politics permeated election night. "This is an historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African-Americans," declared Republican candidate John McCain in his concession speech. ". . . We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation's reputation."

Obama campaigned as an African-American candidate without a race-based agenda. Yet exactly what it means for the country to be led by a so-called "post-racial" president is still unclear. While Obama's victory is bound to alter the conversation about race between black and white Americans, it doesn't immediately solve the problems that long motivated civil rights leaders.

How might Obama's remarkable achievement affect policy? During a debate in Philadelphia with Hillary Clinton, Obama said in response to a question that his own daughters do not deserve affirmative action because of their economic privilege. As president, will he lead the way from race-based to class-based policies?

Some black leaders say Obama's political success means it's time to shift away from the dialogue of victimhood.

"Racism is no longer the primary obstacle to black progress. With the election of a black man whose middle name is Hussein, the rhetoric of white racism is off the table," declared the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Boston-based minister with a national agenda and a history of taking controversial stands. "Black people don't want to hear it. White people don't want to hear it. . . . The old school is over."

By "old school," Rivers is referring to what he calls the "professional protest leadership" represented by civil rights activists like Jackson. That worldview, said Rivers, calls for "decrying inequality" and blaming white racism for all the problems of African-Americans.

Kevin Peterson, a Boston community activist who runs the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester, also calls for a new brand of black leadership. "Obama's success this political cycle represents a new style," Peterson said. "The notion that black people need to employ racially polarizing stances is now extinct. There are more effective ways to get things done for our communities than being accusatory."

At the same time, major disparities in income and education continue to separate black and white America; gang violence takes the lives of black teenagers in cities across America; and a generation of black men call prison their home. Community leaders want these problems solved somehow.

Said the Rev. Mark Scott, another Boston-based minister, "You can't say it's because of racism. You can't just say, 'Pull your pants up.' You have to ask, 'What work are we going to do to close the gaps?' "

During the campaign, Obama was forced to break with the racially polarizing rhetoric of his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In his speech on race, Obama faulted Wright for failing to recognize the country's racial progress. However, he did not cut Wright loose until the minister reignited the controversy with more polarizing remarks.

Obama did not escape criticism for some of his own remarks, including a reference to his grandmother as "a typical white person." But he stayed away from the inflammatory rhetoric of the past.

Last summer, Jackson was caught on videotape making crude remarks about Obama and accusing the presidential candidate of "talking down to black people." He was scolded by his son, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., who served as co-chairman of Obama's presidential campaign and is now being mentioned as a contender for Obama's US Senate seat.

With Obama's victory, the torch is passing to a new generation of black leaders. But they still face some of the same old challenges.

By Joan Vennochi, The Boston Globe, November 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - Speculation swirled over what appointments President-elect Barack Obama would make as he pivots from an election campaign to the task of building a Democratic administration.

Obama was set Thursday to receive the first of what will become regular briefings on highly classified information from top intelligence officials. He has promised to hold a news conference later in the week as his transition team steps up its work.

Obama's choice for chief of staff, Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, appeared conflicted over whether to take on what promises to be a grueling job. Emanuel told Chicago's WLS-TV that he was honored to be considered but needed to weigh the impact on his family. He was a political and policy aide in the Clinton White House.

"I have a lot to weigh: the basis of public service, which Ive given my life to, a career choice. And most importantly, what I want to do as a parent," Emanuel said in an interview aired Wednesday. "And I know something about the White House. That, I assume, is one of the reasons that President-elect Obama would like me to serve. But I also know something about what it means to a family."

Emanuel added: "This is not a professional choice. This is a personal choice about what my wife and I want to do for our family, as much as what to do with my career."

In offering the post to Emanuel, Obama turned to a fellow Chicago politician with a far different style from his own, a man known for his bluntness as well as his single-minded determination.

After leaving the Clinton White House, Emanuel turned to investment banking, then won a Chicago-area House seat six years ago. In Congress, he moved quickly into the leadership. As chairman of the Democratic campaign committee in 2006, he played an instrumental role in restoring his party to power after 12 years in the minority.

Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long primary battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not surprising given his long-standing ties to the former first lady and his Illinois connections with Obama.

Several Democrats said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who won a new six-year term on Tuesday, was angling for secretary of state. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

Kerry's spokeswoman, Brigid O'Rourke, disputed the reports. "It's not true. It's ridiculous," she said.

Announcement of the transition team came in a written statement from the Obama camp.

The group is headed by John Podesta, who served as chief of staff under President Clinton; Pete Rouse, who has been Obama's chief of staff in the Senate; and Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the president-elect and campaign adviser.

Several Democrats described a sprawling operation well under way. Officials had kept deliberations under wraps to avoid the appearance of overconfidence in the weeks leading to Tuesday's election.

By DAVID ESPO, Associated Press, November 6, 2008

For Americans young and old, the magnitude of Barack Obama's history-making victory begins to sink in.

After the fireworks stopped, the tears of joy or despair dried and the jubilant crowds straggled home, the magnitude of what happened on election day 2008 began to set in. Barack Obama was president-elect, the first black man in the country's history to claim the Oval Office.

The response was as complex and varied as America itself: elation, shock, doubt, wonder and some hard feelings.

Older folks put their trust in children they decided knew better. College students paid homage to the civil rights heroes upon whose shoulders Obama stood. A struggling businessman took heart that things might start to turn around. A woman opposed to abortion feared damnation.

When the nation awoke Wednesday, it was, for better or for worse, "a whole new world."

Longmont, Colo.

The succulent smell of fresh pan dulce permeated Vicente Fuentes' bakery Wednesday morning, almost as sweet as the joy he felt in contemplating the nation's first black president.

As customers trickled in, Fuentes, 43, was still talking about what he had seen Tuesday night, when Obama delivered his victory speech to as many as 200,000 people in Chicago's Grant Park.

"I said to my wife, 'Watch the TV -- in Chicago, in the park.' The white people, black people, Hispanic people," Fuentes said. "All races in the same park. And they wait for a black man. This is great. This is beautiful for this country."

Among the most striking results of Obama's decisive victory was the strong support from Latinos like Fuentes. During the Democratic primary, Obama lost the group to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. But in the presidential election, Latinos backed Obama by a 2-1 margin over Republican John McCain, according to exit polls.

Latino activists say the community rallied behind a candidate who was a racial minority and the son of an immigrant.

"Seeing a person of color rise to this office gives hope to all persons of color -- hey, you could do this, the American dream still is within reach," said Dan Pabon, a lawyer and Obama campaign volunteer in Denver.

"Maybe in 25, 30 years," Fuentes said, "we have a Hispanic president. Why not?"

North Miami

At the Bagel Bar East Bakery & Deli, Obama's victory was being pondered more than relished during Wednesday's lunch rush.

Asked if he was pleased with the election outcome, Al Meyersohn, a 77-year-old retired manufacturer of polymers from New Jersey, replied with little emotion: "No."

Meyersohn supported McCain.

"I'm a Korean War veteran, and I've always liked McCain and admired him for what he's been through," said Meyersohn as he and his wife waited for a table. "I think he would have been a good leader."

Sitting at the lunch counter was Sandy Liebowitz, who voted for Obama at the urging of his son and business partner, Michael. He still had reservations about the Democrat's ties to proponents of anti-Israeli rhetoric like Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi.

"I was concerned about that," said Liebowitz, 58, enjoying a pastrami on rye.

"There's too many other people involved who will steer Obama away from that," said Michael Liebowitz, 29.

Their L&M Engraving and Trophy business has been experiencing a bit of a slowdown, the son noted, adding that he has more confidence in Obama's economic plans. Sandy Liebowitz, who had been looking pensive as his son spoke about Obama's promise, seemed to come to a surprising conclusion.

"The future is going to be amazing," he said, "and in a positive way."

Ira Abler, a 79-year-old property manager with no plans to retire any time soon, said he was pleased with Obama's victory and incredulous about GOP accusations that the president-elect bodes danger to relations with Israel.

Having an accomplished, inspirational, family-oriented man of color as president sends the right signal to the world -- to America's friends and enemies, Abler said.

"When they announced on TV that he was president, I actually cried," he said, choking up again.

Los Angeles

Among the Crenshaw High School leaders gathered in the library Wednesday, one got rock star treatment: Pierre Dupree, 18, the only student old enough to have cast a ballot for Obama.

"Oh my God, you got to vote?" several of his 17-year-old classmates shrieked jealously. Instinctively, they reached out to hug and touch him, as though they could experience the voting through him.

"What was it like?" one student asked.

Dupree smiled at the memory of the voting booth. "I felt proud. I thought, 'I'm voting for the first black president the first time I vote,' " he said. "I can't really describe it."

The others nodded, black and brown alike. They look at Obama and see themselves, their hopes for getting into Dartmouth, UCLA and UC Berkeley next year, their dreams of studying veterinary medicine, forensic science, law and psychology. They say they see a future that many of their parents never had.

"My mother was crying yesterday, and I've never seen my mother cry except over my grandmother's death and my brother's death," said Brandi Thibodeaux, 17. "We get to vote in four years to keep him in office."

The student council and class leaders had gathered to discuss homecoming activities, a canned food drive and the winter formal. (That means no T-shirts, flip-flops or caps, one girl spelled out for the boys.) But on this momentous day, student body President Warren Jones also wanted to talk about the fact that "history was made yesterday."

Senior class President Hyacinth Noble, 17, said Obama had "set the bar high" and that others should follow his example.

"No more excuses," she said. "There is still racism, but . . . we all should stretch our dreams to the highest and make our goals the biggest goals in life just like Obama."

Cincinnati

The Price Hill Chili family restaurant on the west side of town is a classic neighborhood joint in a working-class, heavily Roman Catholic neighborhood that, until recently, was overwhelmingly white and Republican. The eatery is a favorite stop for politicians of all stripes who mingle with voters over calorie-laden dishes like French fries with melted cheese.

Recently, GOP Rep. Steve Chabot stopped in with every Republican's favorite campaign accessory, Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as "Joe the Plumber."

Outside, a protester with a plunger screamed "Get your license!" at Wurzelbacher, provoking a confrontation with an unamused Republican, who tackled the man.

Out on the patio Wednesday, the mother and siblings of Steve Driehaus, the Democrat who had just defeated Chabot, lingered over lunch.

"You just feel a weight's been lifted off your shoulders," Don Driehaus said.

Two Republican matrons ordering lunch in the bar said they were too upset to talk about the election.

"I'll just say what they say on TV," one said tersely. "No comment."

Around the corner in the nearly empty dining room, Kathy Horner, 58, an unemployed secretary, was eating a burger with her daughters. A strong opponent of abortion, she voted for Obama, a last-minute decision. "It was hard for me to fill out his name," she said.

Elizabeth Horner, 19, chimed in: "She walked out of the polling booth and said, 'Now, I'm going to hell.' "

Leesburg, Va.

In this slice of Americana rich with symbols of Colonial Virginia, there stands an inn where Thomas Jefferson slept, three 18th century restaurants and two taverns.

What stands as a symbol of modern Virginia, though, is Fabian Saedi, the 66-year-old Iranian American immigrant who owns the lot of them.

If anyone is puzzled by the Old Dominion's stunning 5-percentage-point flip from red to blue Tuesday night, they need look no further than Saedi, who came here 35 years ago to open a restaurant and was greeted with name-calling and broken windows.

Today, he is a successful businessman and part of the transformed Virginia that backed Obama, the first Democratic candidate to win the state in 44 years.

"Virginia wanted change," Saedi said, rejoicing Wednesday morning, tired but happy after staying up half the night watching Obama's victory speech with four sons who refused to go to bed.

"Believe me, when I came to Leesburg I had the same obstacles that Obama had," he said, recalling hours spent at the Library of Congress researching the Founding Fathers' favorite recipes -- Jefferson's dill salad dressing is still on the menu -- only to be spurned. "I could not believe the mentality of people at the time."

But professionals and young families streaming in from across the nation and abroad brought diversity to northern Virginia -- and, with it, more moderate politics. On Tuesday, they tore the top off a Southern bloc that had voted Republican for decades.

The Obama-Biden sign Saedi posted in one of his restaurant windows appeared to offend no one and seemed even to attract a few customers.

"It's a whole new world," he said.

Pahrump, Nev.

Pahrump is a tough town for Democrats. The first political sign you see is for Ron Paul. The Nye County Democratic Party, which calls voters on their birthdays, struggles. At its office, decorated with a National Rifle Assn. banner, the donation box holds $5.

Robert Pickthall -- a retired miner with glasses, a Santa Claus beard and a pit bull named Salt -- had been a registered, if unenthusiastic, Republican. He voted for President Bush in 2000 and John F. Kerry in 2004; he switched his party registration to Democrat this year.

There was something about the lithe black man from Chicago that stirred the 77-year-old white desert rat, whose home is off a gravel road and across from stacks of hay bales. He collects brass candle holders, piggy banks, unicorns and teddy bears.

"This was the first candidate I've been really passionate about since Harry Truman," Pickthall says, pulling out a small notebook in which he jots down his thoughts: If Obama grows enough to fit into his shoes, he'll be one tall dude. . . . President Lincoln, stand aside, here comes President Obama.

Greensboro, N.C.

The moment Obama was elected president, hundreds of students at historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University knew instinctively where to celebrate.

They gathered Tuesday night at a campus statue honoring the "A&T Four": freshmen who in 1960 challenged Jim Crow laws with a sit-in at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter, launching a nationwide sit-in movement.

To many on this downtown campus, the election of an African American president was the culmination of a civil rights struggle spanning generations. Students who celebrated deep into the night spent Wednesday paying tribute to civil rights pioneers who they said made Obama's victory possible.

"It wasn't just Barack Obama who won," said Darius Dawson, 20, a senior. "Martin Luther King Jr. won. Thurgood Marshall won. All the civil rights activists from years ago won."

History weighs heavily here. The walls of the cafeteria are decorated with photos of the lunch counter sit-in, a wild-haired Jesse Jackson at a 1963 protest march and stores smashed during the urban riots of the late 1960s.

Dormitories are named for each of the lunch-counter protesters. A commemorative brick wall nearby contains bullet holes left by National Guard troops who opened fire during a campus protest in 1969, killing a student.

The 10,300 students here are required to take "African American Experience," a course focused on the civil rights movement.

But though they honored the past, they also felt pride in their own role in Obama's victory, said Shelbi Miller, 21, a junior.

Aided by a strong turnout by African Americans, students and young people, Greensboro and surrounding Guilford County voted 59% for Obama on a record 69% turnout.

"Previous elections, a lot of kids didn't vote," Miller said. "This time, kids my age are saying: 'We made a difference.' "




Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2008

The president-elect must match spending priorities to dismal conditions.

Barack Obama was elected with a mandate for economic change on a scale that hasn't been seen in decades.

So what does he do with it?

During two years of campaigning, Obama set forth detailed proposals for tax relief and enhanced government benefits for the middle class, the poor, college-bound students and the elderly.

He called for new government investments in infrastructure and "green" technologies, as well as a dramatic expansion of health insurance largely by making a Medicare-style program available to all.
He now faces a challenge familiar to every other newly elected political leader: how to transform ideas tailored to win votes into something suitable for the real world.

And he will almost certainly have to adapt some of his proposals to accommodate the current financial and economic crisis.

The urgency for action was underscored by another sharp drop in stocks Wednesday, with the Dow Jones industrial average plunging 486 points, or 5%. That brings its decline on the year to more than 31%.

"Obviously the agenda's been taken over by economic conditions," said James K. Galbraith, a professor of finance at the University of Texas and an economic advisor to the president-elect. "There's no reason to think these are going away in six months."

But insiders say Obama may have to mediate between opposing camps on his own economic team. Moderates are cautioning against stimulus efforts that might sharply increase the budget deficit, while others are urging the kinds of aggressive measures associated with President Franklin Roosevelt. During the depths of the Depression, FDR implemented a wide-ranging public works program, aid for farmers and homeowners, and social welfare programs such as Social Security.

The recessionary economy, and the expense of the government's financial rescue program, will undoubtedly complicate Obama's efforts to implement his economic plan. But some advisors say he won't be inclined to abandon his key goals.

"It would be very difficult to come in and say, 'That agenda I've been pursuing for a year and a half? Never mind it,' " Jared Bernstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute said during an interview with The Times last week.

But Bernstein, a key Obama economic advisor, acknowledged that some economic issues may have to be addressed with greater urgency to provide a foundation for others.

"We can't tackle healthcare until we get the economy working," he said. "If the economy is weak, how can you make good on the promises you made?"

Other proposals, by contrast, may move to the front burner. Obama proposed a national infrastructure reinvestment bank to be funded with $60 billion in federal money over 10 years. But congressional leaders have said they may incorporate as much as $150 billion of infrastructure spending in an economic stimulus package that may be enacted before the end of this year.

Such a program is known to be favored by former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, perhaps Obama's most influential economic advisor, on the grounds that it would have a more lasting effect than simply handing out rebate checks to taxpayers.

That's especially so if the program is designed to make grants to state and local governments that already have bridge repairs, highway improvements and other local projects on the drawing board.

On the stump and in campaign material, Obama laid out an economic program focused on government investment and on strengthening the financial safety net for the poor and middle class.

In addition to the infrastructure bank, Obama proposed investing $150 billion over 10 years in alternative energy by doubling federal research and development funding and providing job training and tax credits for that field.

He also proposed to provide college tuition assistance in the form of a tax credit of up to $4,000 and an expansion of Pell Grants, which aid low-income students.

Obama made the elimination of President Bush's tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers a centerpiece of his campaign, proposing to restore the top marginal tax rate to the Clinton-era 39.6% from the current 35%. The tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010, but Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain proposed making them permanent.

Obama has also proposed a tax credit of as much as $1,000 aimed at low- and middle-income households, eliminating income taxes for taxpayers older than 65 earning less than $50,000 a year, and raising the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011 and indexing it to inflation (it is currently scheduled to rise to $7.25 by 2009).

He also plans to strengthen protection for union organizing by fighting state right-to-work laws and employer efforts to classify permanent employees as "independent contractors." The latter is often a device to avoid paying health and pension benefits.

The gathering economic storm prompted Obama to add several emergency measures to his platform. These included rebates of up to $1,000 per family, to be funded from a windfall profits tax on oil companies and pitched as a "down payment on the middle-class tax cut" he had already promised -- although oil company profits are likely to fall if world petroleum prices continue to decline.

He also proposed a $25-billion jobs fund for highway and other infrastructure projects and another $25 billion in revenue sharing to help state and local governments keep essential services afloat in a time of declining tax revenue.

The Illinois senator also began to temper his promise that every spending initiative would be revenue-neutral -- that is, paid for either by a reduction in spending elsewhere or through higher tax receipts.

"It's clear that as events have become more dire, he's become bolder," said Robert Kuttner, founding co-editor of the American Prospect, a liberal journal, and a sometime advisor to the Obama campaign. "This is a race between how bold he's willing to be and how fast the economy is cratering."

The economic slowdown is likely to bring more pleas for emergency spending to the new president's desk, even outside the stimulus package being crafted now on Capitol Hill. As car sales sink, the automobile industry might seek loans or loan guarantees beyond the $25-billion package approved by Congress last month.

With falling home prices and rising foreclosures at the epicenter of the economic crisis, mortgage holders and home builders are likely to be the focus of a broad range of initiatives. Obama earlier proposed a mortgage tax credit for homeowners who don't already receive an income tax deduction because they don't itemize, but more aggressive relief may be sought.

Some advisors argue that a potentially severe recession only underscores the need for a far-reaching stimulus plan focused on infrastructure more than on rebates to spark a short-term bump in consumer spending.

"We don't need more consumption," Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University and an advisor to the campaign, said recently on financial news channel CNBC. "Infrastructure is where we've starved the economy. This is an opportunity at the national level to say, 'Here are all the things we should have been doing and now have to do to get our economy to grow."

The extent to which the Obama administration should push deficit spending is the subject of a debate bubbling within his economic team, according to people close to the group who requested anonymity. Although most appear to accept the Keynesian axiom that economic stimulus in a time of crisis requires deficit spending, the extent of the budget-busting is at issue. After all, more than $1 trillion in financial bailouts and economic stimulus already has been enacted this year and financed by government borrowing.

At the more cautious end of the spectrum, these people say, are former Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers. The latter is thought to be a leading candidate to return to that post.

The campaign, however, seemed to be attempting to quash talk of a split on the economic team when Rubin and Bernstein, who eagerly backs a stimulus plan, published a joint op-ed piece Monday in the New York Times in which they took note of their policy differences.

Rubin acknowledged viewing long-term deficits "as a serious threat . . . to our economic future," while Bernstein minimized the relationship Rubin cited between the deficit and higher interest rates.

They also acknowledged disagreement on trade policy, specifically on whether trade agreements should include provisions protecting foreign workers as a way to preserve U.S. workplace standards, which Bernstein supports.

But they expressed agreement on most fundamental issues, including the need for public investment in education, healthcare and job training, as well as restoring the income tax rates of the Clinton years.

Another contentious issue, the scale of new regulations on the financial markets, was treated gingerly. The aggressive oversight favored by Bernstein is opposed by Rubin, who made his career on Wall Street before joining government.

"Significant reforms are needed," they agreed, but those should be balanced between consumer protection and mitigating systemic risk on one side, and "preserving the benefits of a market-based system on the other."




By Michael A. Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2008

The president-elect acts quickly, naming a transition crew and asking battle-tested Rep. Rahm Emanuel to fill the key White House role of chief of staff.

Reporting from Washington and Chicago -- President-elect Barack Obama began to assemble his new administration Wednesday, offering the White House chief of staff job to a hard-charging member of the Democratic congressional leadership and announcing the heads of a transition staff that will help fill his Cabinet and lay out an agenda for his four-year term.

A day after his decisive victory over Arizona Republican John McCain, Obama spent a rare day in seclusion, exercising at a private gym near his home and later presiding over meetings and a conference call to thank his campaign staff.

He also made one of the most consequential personnel choices he will face, asking Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) to be his chief of staff, according to campaign and congressional officials. There was no indication of Emanuel's response as of Wednesday night.

The White House chief of staff is often a power broker in his own right, making sure the president's decisions are properly executed and acting as a gatekeeper to the Oval Office. As former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel is credited with the party's success in regaining control of Congress in 2006.

Smart and intense, the 48-year-old Emanuel is a veteran of Bill Clinton's White House. He is among the most charismatic figures on Capitol Hill, revered by many Democrats for restoring the party's clout and loathed by some Republicans for his partisan tactics. In the multitude of Emanuel stories, one stands out: the time he boxed up a dead fish and sent it to a political foe, "Godfather"-style.

Obama's transition staff will be based in Washington with a satellite office in Chicago. The president-elect plans to spend most of the 2 1/2 - month transition period in Chicago, flying to Washington as needed.

Obama "can count on complete cooperation from my administration as he makes the transition to the White House," President Bush said Wednesday. He congratulated Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden on what he called "their impressive victory." As part of the transition, they will start to receive daily national intelligence briefings.

Advisors said that Obama would announce several White House staff appointments today. A priority will be filling two Cabinet positions: Homeland Security and Treasury. With the economy foundering and national security a perennial worry, Obama wants those posts filled as soon as mid-November, one advisor said.

Obama allies have been quietly plotting a transition for months, anticipating an election victory. On Wednesday, the campaign announced that it would be headed by a trio of co-chairs: John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse.

Podesta is a former chief of staff under Clinton. Jarrett is one of Obama's closest friends and advisors. Rouse is Obama's former chief of staff in the Senate.

The transition staff is stacked with alumni from Clinton's presidency, underscoring one of Obama's dilemmas: He promised a fresh, bipartisan style -- but in setting up a new government, he also wants the expertise of seasoned Democrats who know what the job entails.

Advisory board members include Carol Browner, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Clinton; William Daley, a Clinton Commerce secretary and brother of Chicago's mayor; Michael Froman, who was chief of staff to former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin; and Federico Pena, ex-Transportation and Energy secretary.

Resumes are pouring in. The unofficial headquarters of the transition staff had been the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center Washington think tank where Podesta is based.

"It's been a deluge that has already overwhelmed my home e-mail account," said Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration who works at the center. He has advised the Obama campaign but is not officially part of the transition operation.

It could be mid- to late December before Obama nominates the bulk of his Cabinet members, an aide said Wednesday. But candidates' names are starting to emerge. One person familiar with the transition said potential nominees for Treasury secretary included Lawrence Summers, who served in the same post under Clinton and advised Obama on economic issues; and Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

A top candidate for secretary of Health and Human Services is former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. He is author of the book "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis."

"That's heavy and that's real," a senior public health official said of Daschle's prospects.

A leading candidate for Environmental Protection Agency chief is Howard A. Learner, founder of the Environmental Law & Policy Center and an environmental advisor to Obama.

Union officials already are pressing to install favorites in the Labor secretary job. Two prospects are former Reps. Richard A. Gephardt and David E. Bonior. Labor officials also are discussing pro-labor executive orders they want to see signed in the first hours of an Obama presidency.

As Obama's government begins to take shape, powerful interest groups in Washington are maneuvering for advantage.

The National Assn. of Manufacturers and the AFL-CIO held dueling news conferences Wednesday in Washington to promote their often conflicting agendas.

The sunnier of the two meetings took place at AFL-CIO headquarters, across Lafayette Square from the White House. Union President John Sweeney touted labor's role in Obama's victory.

He announced that the AFL-CIO's top priority was passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize and collectively bargain.

In a separate news conference, the manufacturers president, former Michigan Republican Gov. John Engler, signaled resistance. Speaking on a panel with other business advocates, Engler warned that it would be dangerous to begin a new administration with a dispute over labor law.

For now, the Emanuel selection is causing the biggest stir. Republicans are mixed in their verdicts. Richard N. Bond, former head of the Republican National Committee, said he hoped Emanuel would stay in Congress rather than help the new president. Bond said that Emanuel, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, is savvy enough to keep Obama from self-destructing.

"I fervently pray he stays right where he is," he said. "He's pound-for-pound the smartest guy I know in politics. And he would absolutely prevent Obama from the overreach which otherwise is destined to occur" -- to the ultimate political benefit, Bond hopes, of the GOP.

Other Republicans see Emanuel as too combative a figure for the job, especially given Obama's promise to end the partisan gamesmanship. As a former head of the party's congressional campaign operations, Emanuel's mission was defeating Republicans -- and he did it with relish.

A Republican congressional leadership aide, who did not want to be quoted by name talking about a member of Congress, said: "President-elect Obama campaigned on the promise of moving beyond politics and bringing real change to Washington. Rahm Emanuel is one of the most partisan Democrats of the Clinton and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi years."

With election results still dribbling in, the magnitude of Obama's victory is becoming more clear.

He beat McCain 52% to 46% nationwide, according to nearly complete returns, making Obama the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson to win more than a bare majority of the popular vote.

The Illinois senator has won 28 states and the District of Columbia, giving him at least 349 electoral votes, well in excess of the 270 needed to win the White House. One of the hardest-fought states, Missouri, was tipping toward Sen. John McCain's column late Wednesday. It would give the Arizonan 173 electoral votes.

The only other state outstanding was North Carolina, a longtime Republican bastion, where Obama ran an aggressive and unexpectedly strong campaign. He was ahead by about 12,000 votes out of more than 4.2 million cast, with a number of provisional ballots still to be tallied. The state has 15 electoral votes.

In Congress, Democrats picked up at least five Senate seats, with four races still to be decided, and gained at least 19 seats in the House, with the outcome of some contests still pending.




By Peter Nicholas and Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2008

But as Republicans struggle to come to terms with their status as a powerless party in Washington, it is not clear how the GOP will define itself, let alone who will lead it.

"Everybody understands that we are going to go through a period of reexamining our identity," said Kevin Madden, a former aide to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) who worked on Romney's presidential campaign.

"We are going to have to figure out how to rebuild the greater coalition of Republicans and independents and conservative Democrats on issues that really matter to voters," Madden said.

That could be even more difficult as Republicans try to reestablish themselves in opposition to the new president. Barack Obama appropriated GOP messages about taxes and reform during the presidential campaign and may not push as liberal an agenda as many Republicans hope.

"Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid may go off the deep end," said veteran GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio, referring to the Democratic House speaker and Senate majority leader. "But Obama is a very, very skillful politician. Why do we think he will suddenly become a dope . . . by lurching to the left?"

Amid the hand-wringing Wednesday, conservative thinkers who helped fashion the Republican rise to power a decade ago were already moving to shape the debate about renewing it.

In newspaper opinion pieces and online essays, they heaped scorn on Bush and congressional Republican leaders for expanding government, driving up the national debt and abandoning the core small-government principles of the party.

"The party that we have supported has betrayed us and abandoned us," said Richard Viguerie, a leading architect of the modern conservative political movement.

Viguerie and others have been particularly critical of the recently enacted financial bail-out pushed by the Bush administration and senior Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

On Capitol Hill, Nevada Sen. John Ensign, who led the Republican senatorial campaign committee, also attributed many of the year's defeats to the loss of the party's fiscal message. "We lost our way on the fundamentals that define Republicans," he said after returns came in Tuesday night.

In the House, where Republicans also suffered heavy losses Tuesday, fiscally conservative lawmakers were already moving Wednesday to take over leadership positions in the conference.

The same representatives, led by Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, spearheaded Republican opposition to the bailout last month -- and may soon get the chance to fight a new Democratic stimulus proposal.

Viguerie and others expressed confidence that Bush's departure in January would help the party return to its roots.

"We're finally untethered from the big-government conservatism that defined the Bush administration," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a leading champion of cutting federal spending.

Flake also urged the party to move away from so-called wedge issues, such as immigration, which Republican strategists historically looked to for an electoral advantage.

"If the Republican Party is a right-wing party, it cannot win. It has to transcend ideology to address the common-sense problems with common-sense solutions," Luntz said. "This is a center-right country, not a right-wing one."

The caution was echoed by Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, who this spring lost a primary fight to a more conservative Republican challenger.

"When I listen to [conservative hosts] Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity," Gilchrest said, "I know this is not the party that I grew up in."




By Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2008

Barack Obama's margin of victory is a modern day-record for the state. Even budding GOP strongholds such as Riverside and San Bernardino counties back the Democrat.

The cobalt blue of California's electoral map masks conflicting hues of political ideology, and Tuesday's election results were an emphaticreminder. Barack Obama won the biggest victory in modern state history, smashing the record set in 1964 in Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide election, but not a single Republican member of Congress was defeated.

Voters sided with animal-rights activists, but not with proponents of gay marriage. They narrowly are supporting a redistricting measure backed by the Republican governor, and opposed a measure he endorsed to inform parents of a minor's abortion.

Those unpredictable decisions by voters, however, were accompaniments to the election's main theme: the demographic and ideological shifts that have delivered the state into Democratic hands and demonstrated anew the tough road ahead for the Republican minority.

In growth areas such as Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where the GOP once planned to mount a statewide resurgence, the Democratic nominee it derided as a far-left liberal and socialist was winning, the beneficiary of the fractured local economy.

There and in the other key electoral counties in California, including the most populous ones, Democrats performed better than their registration levels would indicate. In Los Angeles County, where Democrats hold a 28 percentage-point edge, Obama was winning by 40 points. In San Francisco, where Democrats hold a 47-point margin, he was winning by 70 points.

Moreover, Democrats were building on furious registration gains won in the run-up to the party's competitive primary and increased during the nationally enthralling general election.

In 24 of California's 58 counties, Democrats held the registration advantage in the 2004 presidential contest. They have bigger margins now in 21. In the 31 counties where Republicans outnumbered Democrats, their margins have slumped in 20 and grown in only four. In three counties, including San Bernardino, control has flipped from Republican to Democratic over the four years.

"You can't argue with some of the numbers," said state GOP Vice Chairman Thomas G. Del Beccaro, who nonetheless insisted that Democratic gains were cyclical and may be reversed if Obama were to prove less popular as president than he was as a candidate.

"There are still a number of issues on which Californians have rather conservative views and the successful party going forward needs to tap into those views," he said.

Though Republicans insisted that the solution was recommitting to basic tenets, Democrats were hopeful that the gains will transfer to future races. Much of their effort to register voters was aimed at grooming a generation that would enter the electorate as Democrats and stay that way.

On Tuesday, that labor's first fruits: Among first-time voters, Obama won 83%, according to a National Election Pool exit poll. Four years ago, Democrat John Kerry won 59% of first-time voters.

But Democrats were not taking that change for granted. "This is a generational shift," said California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres, as he celebrated Obama's win Tuesday night. "A generational shift requires responsibility on our part to maintain that support. And that comes in deeds and performance. . . . If we betray that trust, we don't deserve to be reelected."

The full scope of Tuesday's results resided in bins at county registrars' offices, where at least 1.6 million ballots remained uncounted as elections officials dealt with the overload caused by high-turnout contests. Exact turnout will not be known until those ballots are tabulated, but statewide, the participation rate appears to have been the highest in decades.

Regardless of the final results, Obama's victory was sweeping. By late Wednesday, he was leading John McCain by a 24-point margin, more than double the usual win by Democrats since 1992, when Bill Clinton's victory marked the state's return to Democratic control in presidential contests. In the years since World War II, the previous record for a presidential margin in California was the 18.3 percentage points run up by Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. Adding insult to injury for Republicans: Much of the California Obama campaign's recent efforts went to winning neighboring Nevada -- which he did.

Former GOP state Senate leader Jim Brulte said Obama's showing was the result of a horrendous year for Republicans and steady increases in turnout among Latino voters in particular. On Tuesday, the proportion of black voters also rose dramatically.

"The percentage of voting population is beginning to mirror the percentage of diverse population in the state," he said. "Those are changes that have short-term and potentially long-term implications."

Still, Brulte said he was "stunned" at Obama's margin, and particularly his showing in the Inland Empire.

In 2000, George W. Bush beat Al Gore by single digits in Riverside and San Bernardino counties; by 2004, he defeated Kerry by double digits in both counties. As of late Wednesday, however, Obama was winning by five points in San Bernardino County and just over three points in Riverside County.

The Democratic registration effort gets much of the credit. In Riverside County, the Republican advantage of more than 12 points in 2004 was whittled in half by last month, when final pre-election registration numbers were released. San Bernardino County went from a 4-point Republican edge to a narrow Democratic one.

Much of the change stems from the economy. In counties where new housing tracts once signaled toeholds on the American dream, foreclosures are rampant, and the economic fallout is raining over the area's economy and politics.

"In the housing industry, we have a depression in this region; in the car industry, we have a depression. There's a significant, significant problem in this region," said Brulte, who said a local barber recently told him business was off by 40%.

The foundering economy lifted Obama's fortunes in California. According to the exit poll, McCain and Obama split the votes of those who said they were better off than four years ago. But Obama won 80% of the votes of those who thought they were worse off. Unfortunately for McCain, the latter group was almost twice the size of the former.




By Cathleen Decker, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2008

The GOP nominee appears to take his loss in stride and is already discussing his return to his job as a senator.

That the election didn't turn out as he had hoped, friends said, is not the worst thing that McCain, a former prisoner of war, has ever suffered. In the final days of the race, even as polls showed him down, aides said McCain was the one working to keep spirits up.

On election night, said Steve Schmidt, a senior advisor, McCain was "steady, absolutely at peace"

"I think it's obvious, it was a horrific cycle for anybody with an 'R' next to their name," Davis said. "There was a lot of baggage, and we carried it around as best we could."

In the end, said Mark Salter, McCain's longtime Senate chief of staff and co-author of five books, the election was a disappointment but not the end of the world.

"He's got every reason to hold his head up and be proud," Salter said. "He did better in this historically awful environment for us than any other candidate could have done."




By Jill Zuckman, Chicago Tribune, November 6, 2008

'Americans across the political spectrum are justifiably proud,' says the secretary of State in an emotional news conference.

"One of the great things about representing this country is that it continues to surprise," she told reporters at the State Department at a hastily arranged briefing just hours before she left Washington for a peacemaking trip to the Middle East.

"It continues to renew itself. It continues to beat all odds and expectations," she said.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Ala., at the height of the civil rights struggle, Rice overcame numerous obstacles and stereotyped low expectations. She speaks frequently about how improbable her rise to the corridors of power may seem. But she also notes that she succeeded the first black secretary of State, Colin L. Powell, and the first woman to hold the job, Madeleine Albright.

"You just know that Americans are not going to be satisfied until they really do form that perfect union," she said at the news conference. "And while the perfect union may never be in sight, we just keep working at it and trying."

Rice said Republican candidate Sen. John McCain had been "gracious" in defeat and called him "a great patriot."

"I want to note that President-elect Obama was inspirational and I'm certain he will continue to be," Rice said.

During the campaign, she never said who she would vote for, but repeatedly stressed that she is a Republican.




By Matthew Lee, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2008

Race proves to be no discernible handicap, even among the small-town, working-class whites who were considered most resistant to Obama.

Reporting from Washington -- Beneath some of the sharpest assaults on Barack Obama -- that he consorted with radicals, that he condescended to small-town Americans -- was a lingering question: Would white America help elect a black president?

On Tuesday, Obama rode a surge of support across many voter groups. And white Americans played a major role in putting the first black president in the White House.

Obama did not win a majority of white voters; no Democrat has since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he ran equal to the last three Democratic candidates for president among white voters, and even slightly better than the party's 2004 nominee, according to an Edison/Mitofsky exit poll conducted for a consortium of TV networks and the Associated Press.

Race proved to be no discernible handicap, even among the small-town, working-class whites who were considered most resistant to the black political newcomer from Chicago.

The force propelling Obama was clear: a troubled economy that had gone from shaky in the spring and summer to frightening in the fall. But in choosing an African American as the best person to lead in a time of crisis, the nation's voters have broken a number of long-held truths about the hold of race on the country.

Racial antagonism still exists. But with Obama's victory, voters showed that such feelings no longer hovered over American politics as they had for decades.

Most symbolic of that achievement was Obama's victory in Virginia, home to the capital of the Confederacy, where the candidate ended his 21-month campaign with a massive rally in Manassas, near the site of one of the epic battles of the Civil War.

Breaking with recent assumptions, Obama showed that a single candidate can appeal to black voters without losing whites, and to white voters without losing blacks.

"The important question was not black or white but green. That is, who was best to handle the economy," said Peter A. Brown, associate director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

"This is a guy who five years ago was in the state Senate, and Americans decided to trust him with their country," Brown said. "I don't think I'm being overly simplistic by saying these results do demonstrate that racial attitudes have changed."

Obama's coalition cemented during one all-important week of the campaign, in mid-September, when Wall Street financial giants began to collapse and the stock market crashed -- a week in which voters still uncertain what to make of the young junior senator examined their shrinking retirement accounts and dwindling home values and decided to take a chance.

National exit polls Tuesday showed that nearly three-quarters of voters disapproved of the job President Bush was doing. And the vast majority of those Americans showed that they were ready for something different.

By the time President-elect Obama addressed hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters in downtown Chicago, it was hard to remember the reasons why many once believed his candidacy was a long shot.

Opponents spread false Internet rumors that he was a Muslim, which were supposed to scare off Jewish voters in Ohio and Florida. Some speculated that Latinos would not vote for a black candidate. Or that women, angry over the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton in a bruising primary, would either vote for John McCain or stay home. Or that young voters would not back Obama as strongly as his campaign had hoped.

Election day told a different story.

Obama improved on past Democratic performances among all groups, with the singular exception of seniors. He improved on 2004 nominee John F. Kerry's totals among Jews, Protestants and Catholics. While Kerry split women's votes with Bush, Obama won a decisive majority.

Moreover, Obama won the votes of 4 in 10 white men -- higher than the last five Democratic presidential nominees, according to a National Journal study of exit polls -- and nearly half of white independents.

Latinos, courted aggressively by both sides with Spanish-language ad campaigns, went overwhelmingly for Obama. McCain, once popular with Latinos, won 3 in 10 -- a deep decline from the 45% won four years ago by Bush.

Just as Obama helped expand the Democratic coalition -- bringing with him new U.S. senators and House members in Republican states from Florida to North Carolina -- Republicans now face a drastically narrowed party.

Tuesday's results show that Bush and McCain have left the GOP appealing primarily to white conservatives at a time when Obama's ascension symbolizes the growing multiculturalism of America.

The African American share of the electorate, for example, grew slightly, according to network exit polls. That was no doubt a result of the excitement over Obama's candidacy and a deliberate strategy by his campaign to register new voters and contact blacks who had not participated in the past.

Gone from the Bush win column of 2004 were two pivotal states -- Ohio and Florida -- both of which boast growing ethnic diversity. In greater Miami, an ethnic microcosm with large populations of blacks and Latinos, Obama won by more than 140,000 votes -- more than tripling the Democrats' edge there four years ago. In populous Pinellas County near Tampa, Fla., where Bush and Kerry tied, Obama won by 40,000 votes.

But the most reassuring numbers of all for Obama strategists may have been the results among white voters -- particularly those in working-class areas and in key suburbs.

It was, after all, Obama's controversial comments during the primary referring to "bitter" working-class Americans that sparked doubts about his ability to win their votes in the general election.

McCain's campaign sought aggressively in the final weeks to capitalize on Obama's image as an elitist, pulling an obscure plumber from Ohio into the headlines to paint Obama as a liberal who would raise taxes.

But Obama carried mostly white Cambria County in western Pennsylvania's coal country, and carried the county in Ohio that is home to the old steel mecca of Youngstown.

Even in the coal country of southwestern Virginia, Obama minimized his losses, perhaps thanks to his two visits to the region and a swarming effort by the campaign to reassure skeptical whites that his policies were better for their lives. As the president of the coal miners union told locals repeatedly in recent weeks, they could elect a "black friend" or a "white enemy."




By Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008

For the president-elect's fans waiting in Chicago's Grant Park, anxiety gives way to jubilation.

Reporting from Chicago -- The hundreds of thousands celebrating in a park on the Lake Michigan shoreline roared louder each time the giant video monitors showed that Barack Obama had won another battleground state: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico.

"O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma!"

Finally, the underlying anxiety that he might lose gave way once and for all at 10 p.m., when the mass of humanity saw CNN declare Obama the next president of the United States.

They shrieked. They leaped with joy. They hugged strangers. They knelt and prayed.

And they cried.

"I knew it!" shouted Will Grandberry, 23, from Chicago. "I knew he could do it! I knew it wasn't just talk! Hallelujah!"

For Democrats, the despair that followed defeats in the presidential contests of 2000 and 2004 was over.

But Obama's supporters rejoiced over more than that. With the election of an African American president, the United States had crossed its highest racial barrier, and the magnitude of that step was lost on no one.

Certainly not on Brooke Tafoya, a 31-year-old social worker from southeast Chicago.

"It's one of the most positive moments of my whole life," she said, tears streaming down her face. "When I look back and people ask, 'Where were you?' I can be proud to say I was here and watched the whole thing happen. It's our hometown guy making good."

It was Chicago that launched Obama on his journey to the White House, electing him to the Illinois state Senate 12 years ago. Now the world had turned its gaze on the city and its most famous resident. Skyscrapers stayed lighted. Some windows in one high-rise spelled out "U.S.A." Atop another park-front building, revelers watched the crowd from a terrace awash in red, white and blue lights.

By the time Obama and the soon-to-be first family walked onstage, the crowd in Grant Park and nearby had grown to more than 240,000, according to the city's emergency management office.

"Hello Chicago," Obama said, greeting the crowd.

Mellie Tess, 26, hollered out: "Welcome, Mr. President!"

On this day, Obama told the audience, Americans "put their hands on the arc of history" and bent it "toward the hope of a better day."

Obama's supporters had started lining up nearly 12 hours earlier outside chain-link fences set up at the park. Nana Appiah squeezed through the crowd, cradling his camera against his chest, and pressed against the fence with one hope: To see the stage.

"I need to be there for myself," said Appiah, 49, who has spent most of his life in the Windy City. "It doesn't matter that I don't have a ticket into the rally. I just want to be there -- be as close as I can to history." The cab driver was far from alone. All day and well into the night, thousands crowded Chicago's downtown with hopes of seeing Obama.

Appiah shuttled scores of them to the park in his Checker Cab. After work, he parked, pulled on a tattered pair of sneakers and started walking.

Once Appiah entered the park, the stage was barely distinguishable above an ocean of dancing bodies and waving flags. But he could hear everything. As CNN began calling out states Obama was winning, Appiah looked skyward. Tears trickled down his cheeks. He could taste them as he smiled.

Throughout the evening, the crowd burst into chants of "Yes we can!"

But a button pinned on the lapel of one Obama supporter captured the spirit of the moment better: "Yes we did."




By Michael Finnegan and P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008

Elizabeth Dole falls in North Carolina on a bad night for the GOP, but Democrats appear short of a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Sizable Democratic gains are seen in the House.

Reporting from Washington -- Democrats strengthened their grip on Congress in Tuesday's elections, toppling Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole and John Sununu, but they appeared to be falling short in their bid for perhaps the biggest prize on Capitol Hill: a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

With the election of Barack Obama as president and their party in control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time in 14 years, Democrats are nonetheless in a better position to advance their initiatives.

In the House, Democrats hoped to become the first party in more than half a century to make a net gain of 20 or more seats in back-to-back elections.

In the Senate, they either won or held leads in contests for at least five Republican-held seats, making it likely they will increase their majority to at least 56 seats. Four other contests remained undecided early today.

Sixty votes are needed to break a filibuster. But with a larger majority, Democrats should be able to peel off enough Republican votes to achieve many priorities.

Democrats benefited from Obama's coattails and a strategy that sought to tie Republicans to the deeply unpopular President Bush at a time of economic hardship. As a result, no Democratic-held Senate seat appeared in danger.

In North Carolina, Democrat Kay Hagan, who as a Capitol intern years ago operated the senators' elevator, defeated Dole, a big-name Republican who was once considered a shoo-in for reelection. In New Hampshire, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen turned out Sununu.

In the West, Democrat Tom Udall won the New Mexico Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Pete Domenici. His cousin, Mark Udall, won the Colorado Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Wayne Allard.

Claiming another formerly Republican seat, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, a former governor, will succeed retiring Republican Sen. John Warner, who is no relation.

In Minnesota, the most expensive Senate race, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken of "Saturday Night Live" fame were locked in a tight race. In Oregon, Republican Sen. Gordon Smith faced a strong challenge from Democrat Jeff Merkley.

In Alaska, Ted Stevens, the longest-serving but scandal-plagued Republican senator, faced a tough challenge from Democrat Mark Begich, mayor of Anchorage.

In Georgia, Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss faced a strong challenge from Democrat Jim Martin.

In a bit of relief for Republicans, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky fended off a strong challenge from Democrat Bruce Lunsford to win reelection.

"Winston Churchill once said that the most exhilarating feeling in life is to be shot at -- and missed," McConnell said after his victory

And in Mississippi, another seat the Democrats hoped to capture, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker defeated Democrat Ronnie Musgrove.

Going into the election, Democrats controlled the Senate 51-49, with the help of two Democratic-leaning independents.

"The days of obstruction are over," Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, who oversaw the Democrats' Senate campaigns, declared at a Democratic victory party in Washington.

Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who headed the Senate Republicans' campaign effort, said he was disappointed with the results, adding, "The political environment was so toxic this year for Republicans."

Ensign predicted the GOP would fare better in 2010. "I think that the Democrats are going to overreach," he said.

Democrats face one potential complication because of their strained relationship with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the party's 2000 vice presidential nominee. A number of Democrats want to punish the Connecticut senator, now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, for his support of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

One punitive step would be to strip him of his committee chairmanship. But Democrats may need Lieberman's vote to advance their priorities.

Among the Senate newcomers will be Bush's former Agriculture secretary, Mike Johanns, a Republican leading in the contest for the Nebraska Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel. Republican Jim Risch was expected to take the Idaho Senate seat being vacated by disgraced Republican Sen. Larry Craig.

But the Democratic victories are likely to embolden the party to pursue an agenda that includes economic stimulus, healthcare and climate change legislation.

In the House, Democrats, who hold a 235-199 edge with one vacancy, gained about a dozen seats, according to incomplete returns, and toppled the last remaining Republican House member from New England, Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, who lost to Democrat Jim Himes.

Widespread GOP losses could cost House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio his leadership job.

Even before the final tally, Rep. Adam Putnam of Florida, who as chairman of the House Republican Conference was the House's third-ranking Republican, said he was giving up his leadership post.




By Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008

A look at how four voters, once attracted to John McCain, ended up supporting Barack Obama.

___

BREAKING A FAMILY TRADITION

Republican Kelly Townsend, 50, saw only McCain-Palin yard signs around her neighborhood in Abilene, Texas. Her town and family are strongly conservative, said Townsend. Choosing McCain only seemed right, at first. "He reminds me of my father," said Townsend. And she was "just used to voting Republican." But Townsend had second thoughts when McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

"I respect John McCain," she said. But she didn't like Palin's "vacuous look" and strong opposition to abortion. Then Wall Street crumbled, stocks fluctuated, the government intervened, layoffs rose, and retirement accounts leaked. Townsend, who is self-employed as a property owner, said she knew people who have recently filed for bankruptcy. The middle class needs help, she said. "If people want to call it socialist - whatever, I don't care. We have got to do something." She thought McCain seemed too vested in continuing the Iraq war at any cost to the economy. She voted for Obama. "He wants to have health care for everyone," Townsend said. "He wants to give tax cuts to the middle class." Her father supported McCain. "I love my daddy," she said, "but I can't do that."

___

ANOTHER BUSH

Before the presidential debates, Edward Miller, 61, of Scottsville, Ky., supported McCain because of his political experience and military service. In the primaries, he had supported Hillary Rodham Clinton, thinking Obama was too inexperienced. "After she was out of the picture, well I just thought McCain's ideas are all right as well," he said. But Miller, a Democrat who restores cars and raises cattle for a living, began to change his mind when he watched the candidates' three debate performances, spread from the end of September through mid-October. "Obama was straight with what he said," Miller said. "McCain was saying the same old thing over and over again, and nothing that I understand."

"I think the last two debates really put me over the top," he said. Miller, who doesn't have health insurance, didn't agree with McCain's health care plan, or his Iraq war position. "The war in the Iraq - I'm sick of that. ... I just think that's another Vietnam," he said. "I just feel that he's going to keep spending money the wrong way." After doing some research, Miller decided it was time to switch his support to the Obama. McCain "did have a lot of George Bush's policies," he said. "Well, that does it right there for me."

___

THE PALIN EFFECT

Living in Florida, a heavily contested battleground state, SaraSue Crawford, 30, was never at a loss for information on the presidential candidates. Her mailbox always was full of campaign fliers. Crawford, an independent living in Jacksonville, wavered between McCain and Obama. She was attracted to Obama's honesty and promise of change, but Palin intrigued her. The stay-at-home mother to a 3-month-old boy liked that a woman could be so close to the presidency. "Just the thought of a woman in a very high office like that," Crawford said, was "very appealing." The intrigue didn't last long. "I really don't agree with her religious stance. She frightens me." Crawford said. The sputtering economy also made her reminisce about earlier years. "I just remember that before we had a Republican president, back in 2000, our economy was very good," she said. "The American dollar was really worth something."

The economy is depressing, she said, "and I'm hoping that a Democrat, if not reverse it, will just stop it." She said she voted for the Democratic ticket for the same reason she was initially attracted to it: "the promise of change and hope."

___

A VOTE FOR HEALTH CARE

Lois Neeley, a 71-year-old retired nurse in Lexington, Ky., was rooting for Clinton all the way in the primaries. She remembered good times during Bill Clinton's presidency. "I think that couple could turn this country around," she said. When Clinton dropped out of the Democratic primary in June, Neeley didn't know whom to support. She didn't know anything about Obama, and was wary of supporting Clinton's onetime opponent.

She was impressed by McCain's prisoner of war history and his longtime Senate experience. During the summer, Neeley considered both candidates. "I was hoping he (Obama) would pick Hillary, and I began to look at him for that reason." When Obama choose Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate instead, Neeley was impressed with the Delaware senator's personal story and foreign relations experience. And Palin? Neeley says that told her McCain "can't make good choices."

Around the time the candidates were choosing their running mates, Neeley's pharmacy told her that Medicare couldn't cover some prescription costs any more for her. "That got my attention," said Neeley, who has emphysema and heart problems. She favors Obama's health care plan, which aims for universal coverage without guaranteeing it. "I think that Obama is the second-best choice after Hillary, and I think that Obama will do all he can."

By CHRISTINE SIMMONS, The Associated Press, November 5, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama, so steady in public, did not hide his vexation when he summoned his top advisers to meet with him in Chicago on Sept. 14.

His general-election campaign had gone stale. For weeks, he had watched Sen. John McCain suction up the oxygen in the race, driving the news coverage after the boisterous Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., and suddenly drawing huge crowds with his new running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Convening the meeting that Sunday in the office of David Axelrod, his chief strategist, Obama was blunt: It was time to get serious.

"He said, 'You know, maybe we can just win it on the issues. But I don't think so,' " recalled senior adviser Anita Dunn. With the debates approaching and just seven weeks until the election, "his charge to everybody was 'Guys, we're back in combat mode,' " Dunn said.

And then, the next morning, a global earthquake hit: Lehman Brothers, the giant investment firm, filed for bankruptcy, triggering the biggest corporate collapse in U.S. history and an international financial meltdown, and transforming the presidential race.

It was a moment neither the senator from Illinois nor his advisers had anticipated, but one for which they were uniquely prepared. In the days that followed, the newly chastised Obama team became more aggressive, with a message they had refined over the summer. The candidate himself, criticized as too cool, too cerebral and too detached, suddenly had the opportunity to show those qualities to be reassuring and presidential.

For McCain, already struggling with the economic issue, the Wall Street meltdown became part of a much different narrative. By the time the senator from Arizona made the surprise announcement on Sept. 24 that he would suspend his campaign, a powerful image had been framed: of an "erratic," older Republican who could not be trusted to handle a crisis, economic or otherwise.

In a race that had been thought to be even, the polls showed Obama to be pulling ahead, a lead that he would not relinquish through three debates and the election's closing weeks.

"It was a pivotal two weeks of the election," Axelrod said yesterday. ". . . It changed the structure of the race, in that it just never went back. Once people had rendered that verdict, it just didn't change."

In the end, both the candidate and the campaign lived up to the challenge Obama outlined that Sunday in Chicago. They benefited from a dose of what his staff called "Obama luck." But to paraphrase the famous adage of Pasteur, it was the kind of luck that favored only a prepared candidate.

If Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) had been a formidable primary opponent, McCain seemed to present another challenge to Obama -- as one of the few Republicans who could potentially slip the damaging shackles of his party and run on his compelling biography as a former prisoner of war and as someone with a record of working with Democrats.

"John McCain had the potential to be the toughest Republican opponent we could have drawn," said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's communications director. "Although his record told a different story, his national celebrity was based on his opposition to President Bush and his reform credentials. On paper, McCain was perfectly suited to run a very strong campaign that nullified some of our strengths and exploited some of our weaknesses."

In hindsight, however, the primaries tested Obama's political instincts and endurance more than the general election ever would. His long-shot triumph in the nominating process came after an intense focus on one state, Iowa, for most of 2007, followed by a grueling 55 contests, across multiple time zones, against a relentlessly energetic opponent, for months.

McCain turned out to be a less rigorous match, whose staff "worked hard, but there's a difference between going all out in ways you didn't even know you could do, and just working hard," said one Obama aide. Because of the nature of the electoral college map, McCain actually challenged Obama in fewer states than Clinton did; then he gave Obama the unexpected gift of pulling out of the expensive battleground of Michigan in early October.

"John McCain was nothing compared to Hillary Clinton," the Obama aide said.

New Slogan, New Strategies

But no one knew that in June, when Obama finally defeated Clinton after a bruising primary campaign. What Obama's aides did know was that they would need a message adjustment, away from "Change We Can Believe In," which had worked so well against the Clinton juggernaut by suggesting that her claim to be a change agent was insincere. By late summer, after researching and road-testing slogans, there was a new one, tailored for McCain: "The Change We Need."

At the campaign's headquarters in Chicago, an unprecedented ground game was under development. Regional directors, battle-hardened during the primaries, were retrained and dispatched the moment the general election launched, opening offices across an ambitious 18-state battleground.

Rather than work toward a traditional Democratic electoral map that hinged on trying to steal Ohio or Florida, Obama advisers aimed at using the candidate's unique profile -- and the vast public dissatisfaction with President Bush -- to peel off seemingly more difficult states such as Virginia and Colorado.

"We decided at the get-go to have a very broad playing field and to run, in each of these states, the largest presidential campaign in history," said campaign manager David Plouffe.

Jon Carson, a brainy, 33-year-old field director, developed sophisticated databases to chart developments -- the number of hits the campaign's Florida Web page got in a single day, for example, or the number of people nationwide who had downloaded voter-registration forms. Such unprecedented technology would later give the campaign confidence that its strength in Republican-leaning states was not a mirage.

Fueling it all was an influx of money like none in history. In June, Obama decided to forgo public financing in the general election -- another potentially dangerous move, but one that the last Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), adamantly urged. Obama raised as much as $750 million, a sum so staggering, so much greater than the $84 million McCain took in public financing and the $240 million more than the Republican Party raised, that it was a line of attack for McCain as he tried to argue that the decks were unfairly stacked.

For all these overwhelming advantages, Obama had a steady but stubbornly narrow lead at the beginning of the summer. But three potentially decisive moments were on the horizon: the selection of a running mate, the Democratic convention in August and the debates against McCain in the fall. Obama added a risky fourth -- a trip abroad in July.

Still recovering from the exhausting primaries, his campaign put its efforts into the foreign trip, believing Obama could not take on a war hero if he did not set foot in Iraq once more. He traveled for a week and a half, visiting Iraq and Afghanistan, then Europe.

The most publicized event of the journey was his speech in Berlin, which drew an audience of 200,000. The address, a bold, outsize move -- four years earlier, Kerry had fought mockery that he seemed too "French," and Obama was already edging toward being seen as elitist -- was in part a nod to independent voters weary of the negative U.S. image abroad.

The campaign knew it was a risk nonetheless. The idea was to "get it out of the way early," one adviser said, then switch from foreign policy, a perceived strength for McCain, back to health care and economic issues soon afterward.

Some Obama supporters thought the trip could produce a modest bounce in the polls. Instead the numbers remained static, and the travel gave the McCain campaign an opening to mock the Democratic nominee as a megastar abroad but an empty vessel at home. In a television advertisement released in late July, McCain compared Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

"He's the biggest celebrity in the world. But is he ready to lead?" the ad's narrator taunted. McCain, unable to bring Obama back down to his own level, hoped to push him even higher up into the clouds, to make him seem completely inaccessible.

While Obama's advisers were confident about the fundamental dynamics of the race, they found this line of attack worrisome. They saw it as a page from the extremely effective Republican playbook of the previous two campaigns, portraying the Democrat as an elitist and an outsider who did not share American values. After Obama left for his family vacation in Hawaii, several of his senior strategists convened to present ideas about the way forward.

Almost universally, they concluded that he must shift the focus of the campaign to the economy.

Relying on a stockpile of data gathered over the spring and summer, the strategists agreed that economic instability, driven by the subprime mortgage crisis, was likely to evolve into the dominant theme of the race. It had not been Obama's strong suit in the primaries: He had seemed to float above economic hardship, discussing it in the abstract, while Clinton reached working-class voters on a visceral level. His team recognized, by late summer, that it was their urgent mission to fix that.

In one August memo, Axelrod warned that it was essential to redirect the growing attacks on Obama's persona back toward the concerns of average voters.

"They are following the Mark Penn blueprint, hoping to paint Barack as both culturally alien and inexperienced -- a silver-tongued empty suit, embraced by Washington but undeserving of the position or celebrity he commands. (Like Britney and Paris)," Axelrod wrote in a four-page memo, referring to the former chief Clinton strategist. "A far left liberal, whose views on taxes, crime and other issues are out of sync with the American people. And a dogmatic Democrat, willing to put interest group politics ahead of the country's interests. (Drilling.)"

Axelrod continued: "Candidly, I think the Republicans have had some success in the last few weeks in making this a referendum on Barack, or, more accurately, their caricature of him. In the coming weeks, we must change that dynamic by using our campaigning, spots and Convention to burst that caricature and draw a sharp contrast on fundamental economic issues and values."

Joel Benenson, Obama's lead pollster, separately concluded in August that the campaign would need to target a slice of undecided voters deeply motivated by economic concerns. In a PowerPoint presentation, Benenson identified about one-quarter of the electorate as being "up for grabs" in the 18 battleground states, with 67 percent of them citing the economy as a top issue, far more than the 51 percent who named Iraq.

And it was possible to fuse the two. "Don't forget that Iraq is an economic issue," Benenson wrote.

He went on to make the case for taking a harder line against McCain -- listing areas of vulnerability, such as being "out of touch," that made undecided voters sour on the Republican when they learned about them, according to the campaign's research. That laid the groundwork for the moment weeks later when McCain struggled to answer a question about how many homes he had: The Obama campaign, sometimes split on whether to attack its rival, did not hesitate to pounce.

The tension over how and when to hit McCain surfaced repeatedly during the course of the primaries and then the general election, and was often seen by the staff as a split between Axelrod, the idealist and master of grand strategy, and Plouffe, the calculating tactician.

In a campaign that thrived on discipline, the disagreements were almost never publicly aired, but they existed behind closed doors, aides said. Axelrod, a soulful father figure inside the campaign, was seen as the one channeling Obama, with both adviser and candidate urging restraint and a focus on the issues.

Later, Obama's competitive instincts would kick in and he would urge going after McCain more aggressively -- a development that was met with a mixture of amusement and relief by aides who had been itching to get tougher all along. But that was not where he was in late summer.

Dozens of advertisements were created that never ran. One health-care ad was stripped of a line accusing McCain of supporting the "biggest middle-class tax increase in history" because it was too much of an exaggeration. Obama ultimately rejected the line himself, advisers said, replacing it with a more modest statement about taxing health benefits -- a reflex aides came to expect from a certain wing of the campaign.

"Plouffe has pretty harsh instincts. Axe doesn't always," one aide said, referring to Axelrod by his nickname. "Axe is protecting the brand," the aide said -- meaning Obama's personal brand as an extraordinary, above-the-fray figure running a "different kind of campaign."

Unfazed by Palin 'Hysteria'

On the Friday morning after Obama delivered his soaring convention address to 84,000 supporters at Invesco Field, Democrats awoke in Denver to the stunning report that McCain was about to announce an absolute unknown, Palin, as his running mate. Excitement from Obama's speech quickly turned to disbelief, then outrage, then panic. McCain had chosen a female vice presidential nominee, the first Republican ever to do so, in an effort to peel away female voters -- reopening the wound over Clinton that Democrats thought they had healed over the previous few days.

Only Obama's advisers were giddy about the choice.

Since early July, the campaign's researchers had met daily to discuss the list of possible Republican vice presidential choices, based on news accounts and their best guess at how McCain's mind might work.

Palin had been on the Obama short list for a few weeks, and then had been taken off when stories about her efforts to get her brother-in-law fired from the Alaska state police broke.

Dunn, the senior Obama adviser, had the unique perspective of having run a campaign against Palin two years earlier, as an adviser to Alaskan gubernatorial candidate Tony Knowles. She considered Palin a formidable and charismatic politician; she also had a grasp of Palin's thin record and her history on the "bridge to nowhere," and had sat through numerous Palin-Knowles debates.

That Palin expertise, shared by few in the country, would steady the Obama campaign at a moment when national Democrats embarked on what one adviser described as "two weeks of total hysteria" over the Alaska governor.

Dunn had the research staff stop putting so much energy into Palin, convinced that she could not pass the vetting process. "How was I to know that they weren't going to vet her?" she said.

The morning McCain announced Palin as his vice presidential pick, as Democrats scrambled for the right way to react to a woman they had barely heard of, Obama spokesman Bill Burton gave the campaign's first official response.

"I think the American people are pretty surprised to see that John McCain would pick someone to be a heartbeat away from the presidency who has zero foreign policy experience," Burton told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. "Just a couple years ago she was the mayor of a small town in Alaska."

Shortly afterward, the Obama campaign issued a second statement praising Palin as an "admirable person" and suggesting that they would not attack her. Obama himself seemed to repudiate Burton, saying that "campaigns start getting these hair triggers" at times.

In fact, according to campaign sources, Burton's comments had been approved by all of the campaign's senior staff members. It was not the first time the spokesman had been dispatched to say something over the edge, only to pull it back later -- part of the delicate art of advancing negative ideas about the GOP ticket without being accused of doing so.

When they successfully hit McCain hard without suffering any consequences, Obama aides considered it a success. It was worth noting, one adviser said with evident pride, that what Burton said on television that day "was the line of attack that the left took for the next month."

More fundamentally, the Palin selection removed a worry that Obama advisers had about their candidate's lack of seasoning: In a flash, they felt, McCain had thrown away his central rationale for being president, his experience. It would take several more weeks -- and Palin's devastating interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric -- before Obama's internal data would show that McCain's running mate was dragging the Republican ticket down.

Yet it was the damage done to McCain by the financial disaster and then his response to it that had the most consequences. While Obama bore down on financial issues on the campaign trail, his rival cast about for a message -- initially saying the fundamentals of the economy were strong, then announcing plans to suspend his campaign, then dropping those plans. Obama's speechwriters combed the dictionary to come up with terms that would get at McCain's unsteadiness without directly calling him old or angry, aides said. They settled on "erratic."

"The American people were watching very closely," Axelrod said. "They saw two candidates deal with a crisis in real time, and McCain appeared halting and inconsistent, and Obama seemed very focused and secure."

Amid the sudden explosion of bad economic news, it seemed that the very thing that made Obama's candidacy historic -- the fact that he would be the nation's first black president -- remained unspoken. His candidacy was all about race in one sense: As the first African American nominee of a major party, he ran as the embodiment of American possibilities, with his personal story at the core of that message. But with the exception of one major speech, a few stray comments and answers to questions in interviews, Obama did not dwell on race. How he embraced the historic nature of his bid without seeming to hold a national referendum on race will be part of the campaign's legacy.

His strategists, most of them white, seemed allergic to the subject, dismissing questions about the "Bradley effect" -- the theory that white voters overstate their support for black candidates in polls -- and insisting race would be a nonstory in the end.

Under the radar, advisers kept an eye on potential trouble spots. One aide noted that the campaign had "kept Al Sharpton quiet," avoiding any potentially provocative comments from the reverend by having Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama's, stay in close contact with him.

When a flap erupted last month over Rep. John Lewis's remarks comparing McCain to the 1960s segregationist George Wallace, the official response from the Obama campaign was to play down the comments. But behind the scenes, staff members hit the phones, first calling the Georgia Democrat to get his remarks revised, then calling members of the Congressional Black Caucus to make sure the situation did not escalate. "Our political team called every member of the CBC and said, 'Don't do that,' " an Obama official said.

Obama spoke to his campaign staff after another controversy in July, this one triggered by remarks he made at an event in Missouri. He had warned voters: "What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me: You know, he's not patriotic enough; he's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." When McCain advisers responded angrily that the Democrat was playing the race card, aides to Obama insisted, at first, that he had not been referring to race.

The candidate then rebuked his staff, telling them it was unacceptable "to pretend that it wasn't an issue," one senior adviser said. "No, you just confront it directly, you're honest, and you talk to people, and you move on," Obama told the staff, the adviser said.

A Winning Formula

McCain emerged from the debate season badly bruised, his campaign in disarray. Obama came out emboldened, back on the comfortable terrain of an issue -- the economy -- on which he had grown increasingly confident, both substantively and in terms of campaign politics.

He had reacted to the Wall Street implosion with the earnestness of a student (talking with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. nearly every day) and his characteristic calm. His campaign had laid the groundwork for his economic embrace since summer, in part by taking the step, unusual for a Democrat, of a message blitz on taxes, preemptively arguing that Obama would lower most.

And they had put Obama in smaller settings, with his sleeves rolled up, talking to voters at picnics and barbecues, to convey the sense that he was "among people, and not above them," in Axelrod's words.

He had embraced the legendary Clinton message, "it's the economy, stupid," without fully embracing either Clinton. He had seamlessly woven it into a narrative all his own, making the economy the cornerstone of his argument that the country was on the wrong track and desperately needed change.

Six days before the election, Obama delivered his $3 million, 30-minute advertisement on seven television channels during prime time. "Earlier this year, we already knew our country was in trouble. . . . But then, a little over a month ago, the bottom fell out," he said, looking directly at the camera and speaking to an estimated 33 million viewers.

It was his closing argument, and it had evolved a long way from his initial rationale for getting into the race -- ending the war in Iraq and bringing about generational change. Lost on no one was how heavily the message borrowed from his greatest rivals, the Clintons, who had defined the economy as their bedrock issue, and the Democratic Party's, 16 years earlier. But it was Obama's now. And yesterday, after one of the longest and most captivating campaign seasons in history, it worked.

By Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post, November 5, 2008

On one Virginia campus, long lines and all-nighters do not deter first-time voters from casting ballots.

Reporting from Fairfax, Va. -- The lines of pajama-clad undergrads waiting to cast ballots -- many for the first time in their lives -- began forming before dawn Tuesday at George Mason University.

"It's kind of like Christmas Day; everyone's abuzz with it," said 18-year-old Lindsey Denny, who had stayed up all night to finish a project on Czech and Slovak immigration routes over the last 200 years.

"At some point last night I just put a Post-it note over my clock because it didn't matter anymore. I was going to vote no matter what time I went to bed -- even if I didn't go to bed."

That type of resolve -- the same that kept hundreds of her classmates from hitting the snooze button Tuesday morning, and led some to skip class to endure hours of waiting in line at a nearby high school -- is part of the reason much has been made of the youth vote this election.

That, and some undeniable numbers: Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan political advocacy group that targets younger voters, reported 2.5 million new registrations from its efforts this election season, more than doubling its 2004 registrations. And turnout by voters younger than 30 in the 2008 primaries and caucuses nearly doubled that of eight years ago, according to the University of Maryland's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which studies youth voting patterns.

Younger voters, according to a recent Gallup Poll, favor Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain by about 2 to 1. (And since initial party affiliation tends to stick, the new registrations suggest a lasting boost to Democratic voter rolls.)

Nowhere has this been more obvious than on college campuses like George Mason, where 18-year-old Jennifer Klipper and other registered Republicans were shuttled to the polls Tuesday in a Students for Obama van. "To be a liberal college student is the cool thing to be right now," she said.

In the student union, across from a boisterous crowd wearing festive garlands and Obama stickers, a lone student furtively approached the College Republicans table to snag a McCain-Palin sticker.

"Be proud," Elise Marsh, the head of the College Republicans, advised him.

"And get beaten up, right," he joked, eyeing the commotion across the atrium.

Still, pollsters and analysts play down claims of a spike in actual youth turnout.

"It looks like we will see something similar in this election to what we saw in 2004," said Michael McDonald, a professor in George Mason's Department of Public and International Affairs.

And even with intense get-out-the-vote efforts -- which some GMU students called borderline harassment -- there were still those who chose to stay in.

"I just didn't feel like I should vote because I didn't know enough," said 19-year-old Chelsea Leitz, lying in her bunk bed.

"And I guess I'm too lazy to find out."

Then there was the e-mail sent at 1:16 a.m. Tuesday, purportedly from Provost Peter N. Stearns, informing students, faculty and staff that election day had been postponed till Wednesday.

Stearns wrote in an e-mail seven hours later: "A message was hacked into the system fraudulently stating that election day has been moved. . . . Please be reminded that election day is today, November 4th."

But for those, like Denny, who went to the polls for the first time, all the hassle of voting Tuesday -- recognizing the hoax and waiting patiently in those long lines -- was worth it: "It was exciting," she said after casting her ballot.

"I guess I just feel grown up."




By Cynthia Dizikes, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008

I come to this moment of national decision with deep concerns about the next president. His victory is likely to unleash an ideological and vengeful Democratic Congress. In the testing of a long campaign, Barack Obama has seemed thoughtful but sometimes hesitant and unsure of his bearings. He promises outreach and healing but holds to a liberalism that sees no need for innovation. And as the result of a financial panic that unfairly undermined all Republicans, Obama has stumbled into the most dangerous kind of victory. A mandate for change but not for ideas. A mandate without clear meaning.

But a presidential election is more than a political choice; it is a moral dividing line. It involves not just the triumph of a majority but a transfer of legitimacy that binds the minority as well. This is a largely undiscussed topic in modern political debate: legitimacy. It is a kind of democratic magic that turns votes into authority. It does not require political agreement. It does imply a patriotic respect for the processes of government and a determination to honor the president for the sake of the office he holds.

In the past few decades, the magic of legitimacy has seemed to fade. Opponents of President Bill Clinton turned their disagreements (and Clinton's human failures) into an assault on his power. Some turned to insane conspiracy theories, including accusations of politically motivated murder. After President Bush's reelection, elements of the left began their own attack on his legitimacy, talking of impeachment while repeating lunatic theories about deception and criminality.

After a deserved honeymoon, the new president is likely to find that the intensity of this bitterness has only gathered. Because of the ideological polarization of cable television news, talk radio and the Internet, Americans can now get their information from entirely partisan sources. They can live, if they choose to, in an ideological world of their own creation, viewing anyone outside that world as an idiot or criminal, and finding many who will cheer their intemperance. Liberals have perfected this machinery of disdain over the past few years. Given the provocation, the same approach is likely to be turned against the new president by the right as well.

Barack Obama's first years may well be dominated by a recession and a swiftly arming Iran. Some conservatives will be tempted to take joy from his inevitable struggles; others to spin conspiracy theories from his background and associations. It will be easy to blame every emerging challenge on the faults and failures of an inexperienced young president. But it will be more difficult for me.

I remember the vivid days of possibility that follow a presidential victory. I happened to be in the Roosevelt Room in January 2001 just as the portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, heroic on horseback, was moved over the fireplace, where it hangs during Republican administrations. And I know that someone, feeling the same hope and burden that I felt, will be watching when Franklin Roosevelt is moved back to the place of honor.

There is a tremendous sense of history and responsibility that comes with serving in the White House. You gain an appreciation for the conflicted choices others have faced -- and for the untamed role of history in frustrating the best of plans. It becomes easier to understand a president's challenges and harder to question his motives. Ultimately, I believe that every president, and the staff he hires, feels the duty to serve a single national interest. And, ultimately, we need our presidents to succeed, not to fail for our own satisfaction or vindication.

This presidency in particular should be a source of pride even for those who do not share its priorities. An African American will take the oath of office blocks from where slaves were once housed in pens and sold for profit. He will sleep in a house built in part by slave labor, near the room where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation with firm hand. He will host dinners where Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 entertained the first African American to be a formal dinner guest in the White House; command a military that was not officially integrated until 1948. Every event, every act, will complete a cycle of history. It will be the most dramatic possible demonstration that the promise of America -- so long deferred -- is not a lie.

I suspect I will have many substantive criticisms of the new administration, beginning soon enough. Today I have only one message for Barack Obama, who will be our president, my president: Hail to the chief.

By Michael Gerson, The Washington Post, November 5, 2008

Yes, it is time to hope again.

Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between "values voters" and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician.

Above all, it is time to celebrate the country's wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation. For years, we have spoken of bringing free elections to the rest of the world even as we cynically mocked our own ways of conducting politics. Yesterday, we chose to practice what we have been preaching.

Barack Obama's sweeping electoral victory cannot be dismissed merely as a popular reaction to an economic crisis or as a verdict on an unpopular president, though the judgment rendered on President Bush is important.

In choosing Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress, the country put a definitive end to a conservative era rooted in three myths: that a party could govern successfully while constantly denigrating government's role; that Americans were divided in an irrepressible moral conflict pitting a "real America" against some pale imitation; and that market capitalism could succeed without an active government regulating it in the public interest and modestly redistributing income to temper inequalities.

John McCain believed he could win by attacking Obama as a "socialist" who had said he would "spread the wealth around." But a substantial majority rather likes spreading the wealth if doing so means health coverage, pensions and college opportunities for all, or asking the wealthy to bear a slightly larger share of the tax burden.

"John McCain calls this socialism," Obama said at a Pittsburgh rally last week. "I call it opportunity." So did the voters.

Right to the end, McCain and Sarah Palin thought ideological name-calling would work yet again. On the eve of the election, McCain attacked Obama for being in "the far left lane of American politics" while Palin warned of a victory for "the far left wing of the Democrat Party." This year, those epithets didn't hunt.

After 1980, Democrats often chose to accommodate themselves to conservative assumptions. Obama exploded the old framework. He explicitly rejected the idea that Americans were choosing between "more" or "less" government, "big" or "small" government.

He cast the choice differently. "Our government should work for us, not against us," he would say. "It should help us, not hurt us." Obama ran as a progressive, not a conservative, but also as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. That combination will define his presidency.

Since the Nixon era, conservatives have claimed to speak for the "silent majority." Obama represents the future majority. It is the majority of a dynamic country increasingly at ease with its diversity. It reflects the forward-looking optimism of the young. It draws in new suburban and exurban voters whose priorities are resolutely practical -- jobs, schools and transportation -- and who dislike angry quarrels about gay marriage, abortion and religious orthodoxy.

It is the majority of a culturally moderate nation that warmed to Obama's talk of the importance of active fathers, strong families and personal responsibility. He emphasized reducing abortion, not banning it. He honored faith's role in public life but rejected the marginalization of religious minorities and nonbelievers. For large parts of the world, his middle name will be an icon, proof of America's commitment to religious pluralism.

And Obama not only broke the ultimate racial barrier, he also spoke about race as no other politician ever has. He was uniquely able to see the question from both sides of the color line even as he embraced his black identity. He is not post-racial. He is multiracial. The word defines him as a person. It also describes the broad coalition that he built and the country he will lead.

And the majority Obama built wants the country to be strong but also respected, and prudent in its use of power. Iraq was on the ballot after all: Pew's final survey found that those who thought the decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong backed Obama by better than 5 to 1; those who thought it right supported McCain by a nearly identical margin.

Obama inherits challenges that could overwhelm any leader and faces constraints that will tax even his exceptional political skills. But the crisis affords him an opportunity granted few presidents to reshape the country's assumptions, change the terms of debate and transform our politics. The way he campaigned and the way he won suggest that he intends to do just that.

By E. J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post, November 5, 2008

Obama volunteers in North Carolina have focused on registering African Americans. Now they're offering them rides to the polls.

Reporting from Durham, N.C. -- One measure of Barack Obama's grass-roots organization was the line of cars jamming the street outside his headquarters here on election day.

Deborah Iden pulled up in her silver Honda with a "celebrate diversity" bumper sticker. Julie Woodmansee arrived in a Dodge Caravan and Marsha Silver in a Ford Focus, both with Obama bumper stickers. All three had volunteered to drive voters to the polls.

With rain falling all day, voters flooded the Democratic nominee's offices with requests for rides. Many of them were responding to door tags left by Obama canvassers.

"It's so rewarding to help," said Silver, 60, after driving a young man who had no car. "Not being able to get to the polling place is a horrible reason not to vote."

Registering new voters, many of them young or African Americans, and getting them to the polls has been a focus of the Obama campaign -- helping make the Illinois senator competitive in a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976.

North Carolina is 22% black, but African Americans made up 31% of the 967,000 newly registered voters this year. Newly registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.

On Tuesday, 4,900 volunteers turned out for the early morning shift at the 50 Obama field offices across the state, communications director Susan Lagana said. At the cramped downtown Durham office, 50 to 150 showed up.

Scores of volunteers -- most of them white and middle class -- also swarmed the home of Gunther Peck, a Duke University professor who said he formed "Durham for Obama" online earlier this year, starting with 150 volunteers. By election day, the group reported having 10,800 members.

Peck said "Durham for Obama" helped register most of the 18,000 new voters in the county, at least half of whom are African Americans.

As volunteers in the living room fielded calls from low-income and elderly voters seeking rides, Peck sent two vans and a pickup truck out to cruise rain-slicked neighborhoods with a bullhorn to extend the offer.

Alixander Roper, 26, a janitor who does not own a car, said he considered the opportunity to vote for a black presidential candidate "historic." But, he said, he voted for Obama because of the senator's positions on the economy and healthcare, not because of his race.

"A good president is a good president -- whether he's white, black or Chinese," said Roper, whom Silver drove to the polls. "Obama is all about helping out people who are going through hard times."

Lawrence Allen, a 37-year-old cook, said he voted for Obama after Woodmansee, 46, a family lawyer, gave him a ride to the polls. "I never thought I'd see this day," Allen said of the opportunity to vote for a black president. "This feels great."

Woodmansee, who had never volunteered for a political campaign before, said she spent 90 minutes Saturday driving a 65-year-old man to register to vote for the first time.

"Obama talks about things that are very important to me: people working together for a common goal, and his emphasis on helping regular people," Woodmansee said.

Iden, a clinical researcher, drove to the home of an elderly woman in downtown Durham who had requested a ride, only to be informed that the would-be voter was cooking lunch and would not be ready for another two hours.

"That's OK," Iden assured her. "I'll come back. The most important thing is that you vote."




By David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008

Gertrude Baines is the world's oldest person of African descent. She cast her ballot at a convalescent facility near USC.

The walls of Baines' room on the second floor of Western Convalescent Hospital are covered with birthday cards from presidents and officials from years gone by.

A picture of George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, is framed on the wall. Above it is a signed picture of Obama and City Councilman Bernard Parks, now running for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. On Baines' bed sit two teddy bears, one with an Obama pin on its right arm.

"Why am I voting for him? Because he's for the colored," Baines said, her language itself hearkening to a different time. "Sure it's good. That's the first one I know to be in there. Everybody's glad for colored men to be in there sometime."

On Tuesday, Baines sat in her wheelchair, a fuzzy red scarf around her neck, a red bonnet on her head and black slippers on her feet. She is hard of hearing and her memory comes and goes. She tends to refer to historical milestones by who was president at the time.

Aside from chronic arthritis, she is relatively healthy, mobile and attends church every Sunday in the hospital's dining room. That's where her pastor first told her a black man was running for president.

"It struck me," Baines said. "It struck a lot of people when they heard about a colored person" running. Baines looked over at her favorite assistant nurse, Cynthia Thompson. "What's that boy's name?"

"Jesse Jackson?" Thompson said.

"Yeah," Baines said with a laugh. "He tried, but he didn't make it."

"Why they want to keep having white? Why not let a colored person in some time?" Baines said. "I'm glad, I'm glad, I'm glad to get a colored man in there, and so many people are. I hope nothing don't happen to him."

This is only the second time Baines has voted. The last was for John F. Kennedy.

"And you see how they killed him. I was in Memphis, Tennessee, at that time, during the parade. Who was the next president they shot? Two of the boys . . ." she said, trailing off.

A registered Democrat, Baines said she was going to ask the hospital to remove Bush's picture from her wall. "They put him up there," she said disdainfully, waving her hand.

"We are all the same, skin dark, white, that's all," Baines said. She said Obama would be good for everybody. "Republicans don't care for the poor people," she said. "They want it all and they don't want the Democrats to have nothing."

Baines gets most of her election information from chats with hospital workers and friends. Her eyesight is poor, and it is not always easy for her to watch television.

On April 6, she will turn 115. Baines has been at the hospital for about nine years, and has outlived everyone in her family, including her daughter -- who died of typhoid at 18 -- and two nieces.

Baines said she spends much of her time sleeping and eating, but enjoys getting out in her wheelchair for a ride now and then, eating extra crispy bacon for breakfast, and watching "Jerry Springer" from time to time.

As lunch rolled around, Thompson wheeled Baines around to face the television as it cast images of Obama striding by to vote.

"Everybody says they think he's going to get it," she said. "And I hope he do. Maybe things will get better."

Shortly after 8 p.m., her nurse switched on the television and Baines witnessed Obama's victory. Baines smiled and said to the nurse: "I told you so." Then she went to sleep.




By Tami Abdollah, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2008

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis - a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama's call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country.

But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation's fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, 72, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency.

To the very end, Mr. McCain's campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who turned out to hear Mr. Obama's victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago.

Mr. McCain also fought the headwinds of a relentlessly hostile political environment, weighted down with the baggage left to him by President Bush and an economic collapse that took place in the middle of the general election campaign.

"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," said Mr. Obama, standing before a huge wooden lectern with a row of American flags at his back, casting his eyes to a crowd that stretched far into the Chicago night.

"It's been a long time coming," the president-elect added, "but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America."

The focus shifted quickly on Wednesday to the daunting challenges facing the president-elect, with his supporters offering sober reflections of what lies ahead.

"We're in deep trouble," said Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and leader in the civil rights movement, on the Today show on NBC.

"We've got to get our economy out of the ditch, end the war in Iraq and bring our young men and women home, provide health care for all our citizens," Mr. Lewis said. "And he's going to call on us, I believe, to sacrifice. We all must give up something."

Mr. McCain delivered his concession speech under clear skies on the lush lawn of the Arizona Biltmore, in Phoenix, where he and his wife had held their wedding reception. The crowd reacted with scattered boos as he offered his congratulations to Mr. Obama and saluted the historical significance of the moment.

"This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight," Mr. McCain said, adding, "We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation's reputation."

Not only did Mr. Obama capture the presidency, but he led his party to sharp gains in Congress. This puts Democrats in control of the House, the Senate and the White House for the first time since 1995, when Bill Clinton was in office.

The day shimmered with history as voters began lining up before dawn, hours before polls opened, to take part in the culmination of a campaign that over the course of two years commanded an extraordinary amount of attention from the American public.

As the returns became known, and Mr. Obama passed milestone after milestone -Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and New Mexico - people rolled spontaneously into the streets to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.

For Republicans, especially the conservatives who have dominated the party for nearly three decades, the night represented a bitter setback and left them contemplating where they now stand in American politics.

Republican leaders began on Wednesday what will likely be a lengthy re-examination of their brand, as Democrats hope to shape a long-term realignment of the electoral map.

"Certainly, we have to examine this," said Rep. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Texas Republican, on CNN on Wednesday. "We have to listen to what the people are saying if we're going to be a forceful voice."

Mr. Obama and his expanded Democratic majority on Capitol Hill now face the task of governing the country through a difficult period: the likelihood of a deep and prolonged recession, and two wars. He took note of those circumstances in a speech that was notable for its sobriety and its absence of the triumphalism that he might understandably have displayed on a night when he won an Electoral College landslide.

"The road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep," said Mr. Obama, his audience hushed and attentive, with some, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, wiping tears from their eyes. "We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there." The roster of defeated Republicans included some notable party moderates, like Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and signaled that the Republican conference convening early next year in Washington will be not only smaller but more conservative.

Mr. Obama will come into office after an election in which he laid out a number of clear promises: to cut taxes for most Americans, to get the United States out of Iraq in a fast and orderly fashion, and to expand health care.

In a recognition of the difficult transition he faces, given the economic crisis, Mr. Obama is expected to begin filling White House jobs as early as this week.

Mr. Obama defeated Mr. McCain in Ohio, a central battleground in American politics, despite a huge effort that brought Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, back there repeatedly. Mr. Obama had lost the state decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the Democratic primary.

Mr. McCain failed to take from Mr. Obama the two Democratic states that were at the top of his target list: New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Mr. Obama also held on to Minnesota, the state that played host to the convention that nominated Mr. McCain; Wisconsin; and Michigan, a state Mr. McCain once had in his sights.

The apparent breadth of Mr. Obama's sweep left Republicans sobered, and his showing in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania stood out because officials in both parties had said that his struggles there in the primary campaign reflected the resistance of blue-collar voters to supporting a black candidate.

"I always thought there was a potential prejudice factor in the state," Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania who was an early Obama supporter, told reporters in Chicago. "I hope this means we washed that away."

Mr. McCain called Mr. Obama at 10 p.m., Central time, to offer his congratulations. In the call, Mr. Obama said he was eager to sit down and talk; in his concession speech, Mr. McCain said he was ready to help Mr. Obama work through difficult times.

"I need your help," Mr. Obama told his rival, according to an Obama adviser, Robert Gibbs. "You're a leader on so many important issues."

Mr. Bush called Mr. Obama shortly after 10 p.m. to congratulate him on his victory.

"I promise to make this a smooth transition," the president said to Mr. Obama, according to a transcript provided by the White House . "You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations, and go enjoy yourself."

For most Americans, the news of Mr. Obama's election came at 11 p.m., Eastern time, when the networks, waiting for the close of polls in California, declared him the victor. A roar sounded from the 125,000 people gathered in Hutchison Field in Grant Park at the moment that they learned Mr. Obama had been projected the winner.

The scene in Phoenix was decidedly more sour. At several points, Mr. McCain, unsmiling, had to motion his crowd to quiet down - he held out both hands, palms down - when they responded to his words of tribute to Mr. Obama with boos.

Mr. Obama, who watched Mr. McCain's speech from his hotel room in Chicago, offered a hand to voters who had not supported him in this election, when he took the stage 15 minutes later. "To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn," he said, "I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president, too."

Initial signs were that Mr. Obama benefited from a huge turnout of voters, but particularly among blacks. That group made up 13 percent of the electorate, according to surveys of people leaving the polls, compared with 11 percent in 2006.

In North Carolina, Republicans said that the huge surge of African-Americans was one of the big factors that led to Senator Elizabeth Dole, a Republican, losing her re-election bid.

Mr. Obama also did strikingly well among Hispanic voters; Mr. McCain did worse among those voters than Mr. Bush did in 2004. That suggests the damage the Republican Party has suffered among those voters over four years in which Republicans have been at the forefront on the effort to crack down on illegal immigrants.

The election ended what by any definition was one of the most remarkable contests in American political history, drawing what was by every appearance unparalleled public interest.

On Wednesday night in Hong Kong, Colin Powell, former secretary of state in the Bush administration who endorsed Mr. Obama, became emotional, his eyes moistening, while speaking to reporters about the significance of the moment, according to The Associated Press.

"The American people are responding with great emotion and with great pride in our system that we have seen this latest step in reconciliation with respect to our relations," said Mr. Powell to reporters.

"We have not completely reconciled within my society, with my country. But what Mr. Obama represents is the best of America," he said.

Throughout the day on Tuesday, people lined up at the polls for hours - some showing up before dawn - to cast their votes. Aides to both campaigns said that anecdotal evidence suggested record-high voter turnout.

Reflecting the intensity of the two candidates, Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama took a page from what Mr. Bush did in 2004 and continued to campaign after the polls opened.

Mr. McCain left his home in Arizona after voting early Tuesday to fly to Colorado and New Mexico, two states where Mr. Bush won four years ago but where Mr. Obama waged a spirited battle.

These were symbolically appropriate final campaign stops for Mr. McCain, reflecting the imperative he felt of trying to defend Republican states against a challenge from Mr. Obama.

"Get out there and vote," Mr. McCain said in Grand Junction, Colo. "I need your help. Volunteer, knock on doors, get your neighbors to the polls, drag them there if you need to."

By contrast, Mr. Obama flew from his home in Chicago to Indiana, a state that in many ways came to epitomize the audacity of his effort this year. Indiana has not voted for a Democrat since President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory in 1964, and Mr. Obama made an intense bid for support there. He later returned home to Chicago play basketball, his election-day ritual.




By Adam Nagourney, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

Democrats expanded their slim control of the Senate to a solid majority on Tuesday when they picked up at least five seats, ousting Republican incumbents in New Hampshire and North Carolina and capturing seats in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico left vacant by Republican retirements.

But the Democrats appeared to fall several seats short of the 60-vote majority that would enable them to push bills to a vote by overcoming filibusters. And with Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, clinging to a narrow lead over his Democratic challenger despite a recent criminal conviction, it appeared that Mr. Stevens might face a bitter choice: resign his seat even if he wins, or face expulsion.

With 99 percent of Alaska's precincts reporting, Mr. Stevens was ahead of Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, 48 to 47 percent, with the remaining votes going to fringe candidates.

Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota led his Democratic challenger, the comedian Al Franken, by fewer than 600 votes out of nearly 3 million cast, The Associated Press said early Wednesday. But the razor-thin margin set the stage for a recount.

"Let me be clear," Mr. Franken said. "This race is too close to call, and we do not yet know who won." Mr. Franken said his goal in demanding a recount was "to ensure that every vote is properly counted."

Another contest still undecided by Wednesday morning was in Oregon, where Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican, was holding a narrow lead over his Democratic challenger, Jeff Merkley.

But even without the 60-vote threshold, Democrats were within reach of a working coalition on major policy issues, given the defeat of the Republican incumbents John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, and the election of former Gov. Mark Warner in Virginia and of the congressmen-cousins Mark Udall in Colorado and Tom Udall in New Mexico.

Even as the Democrats' celebration began early, one of their most highly prized targets proved out of reach: the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, beat back a serious challenge by Bruce Lunsford, a wealthy businessman.

"Winston Churchill once said that the most exhilarating feeling in life is to be shot at - and missed," Mr. McConnell said in a victory speech in Louisville. "After the last few months, I think what he really meant to say is that there's nothing more exhausting."

At the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington, however, the mood was less exhausted than glum. A handful of young aides milled around watching election returns on Fox News until Senator John Ensign of Nevada, the committee's chairman, emerged to make a brief statement.

"Obviously we expected this sort of night," Mr. Ensign said. "The political winds, I've said for some time, were blowing in our face."

"We caught a very, very tough cycle," he added, "tougher than even Watergate was."

Mr. Ensign and other Republican senators have made no secret of their desire that Mr. Stevens resign because of his conviction for accepting but not reporting gifts related to extensive remodeling of his Alaska home. Should Mr. Stevens refuse to step down, the Senate could hold expulsion proceedings for the first time in many decades.

The Senate has expelled only 15 members since 1789, most for supporting the Confederacy. In recent years, most senators who have run afoul of the law have resigned rather than face expulsion. It takes 67 Senators to expel a member.

Even without a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats were jubilant.

"The days of obstruction are over," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "And in a bipartisan way, we in the Senate and our colleagues in the House will work together to turn America in the right direction after eight long years."

Since winning control of the Senate in 2006, the Democrats have had little breathing room, holding a majority of just 51 to 49, thanks only to two independents, Senators Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who have caucused with them. And Mr. Lieberman has consistently voted against the Democrats on bills related to the Iraq war and national security, giving Republicans and President Bush an edge on those issues.

Mr. Lieberman, a close ally of Senator John McCain, now faces uncertain standing within the Democratic Party; some colleagues have talked about stripping him of his post as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Even so, it is clear that the party will have more muscle to pursue its agenda in the coming Congress.

From the White Mountains of New Hampshire to the Rocky Mountains in the West to the glaciers of Alaska, Democratic candidates rode a wave of dissatisfaction with Republicans and the Bush administration. It began with frustration over the war in Iraq and broadened into fury and dismay over economic turmoil at home, with home prices falling, unemployment on the rise and consumer confidence shattered.

In New Hampshire, the Democrat, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, defeated Mr. Sununu in a bitter rematch of their 2002 contest by repeatedly tying him to President Bush, on the war, national security, economic policies and energy. She becomes the first female senator in the state's history and the first Democrat elected to the Senate from New Hampshire in more than 28 years.

Mrs. Shaheen, 61, capitalized on a huge transformation of the electorate in recent years that has shifted the state solidly into the Democratic column. Mr. Sununu, who at 44 is the youngest senator, had hoped to ride Mr. McCain's coattails but found himself battling alone as support for Mr. McCain dissipated and Senator Barack Obama opened up a wide lead in most voter polls.

In North Carolina, Kay Hagan, a little known state senator, dealt a stunning defeat to Mrs. Dole, a former cabinet secretary and Republican candidate for president who has one of the most famous names in modern Republican politics.

Ms. Hagan portrayed Mrs. Dole as a Washington insider and suggested that she had fallen out of step with the people of her state. Mrs. Dole, in turn, was unable to counter the rising enthusiasm for Mr. Obama among the state's Democrats.

In Virginia, Mr. Warner, a popular former governor, had been heavily favored all year. He easily defeated another former governor, James S. Gilmore III, to succeed Senator John W. Warner (no relation), who is retiring after five terms as one of the Republican Party's most respected voices on military affairs.

The Democrats came into the 2008 contests benefiting from a clear numerical advantage, with just 12 seats to defend, compared with 23 for the Republicans. And while five of those Republican seats were left vacant by retirees, every one of the dozen Democratic incumbents up for re-election opted to run for another term.

In many states defended by Republicans, the Democrats sought to seize on that advantage by putting forward high-profile candidates with substantial name recognition and formidable fund-raising capabilities.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for Democrats was the apparent failure of Mayor Begich to unseat Senator Stevens in Alaska. Recent polls had shown Mr. Begich ahead.

In one bright spot for Republicans, Senator Susan Collins of Maine easily beat back a challenge by Representative Tom Allen, a Democrat whose campaign fizzled even as Mr. Obama won the state by a sizable margin.

In another, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia appeared to be pulling ahead in his race against Jim Martin, a former state legislator, though it was unclear if Mr. Chambliss would have more than 50 percent of the vote, which he needed to avoid a runoff on Dec. 2. Should there be a runoff, without the Libertarian candidate Allen Buckley, Mr. Chambliss could have an advantage, since Mr. Martin probably benefited from a coattail effect with Mr. Obama on the top of the ticket on Tuesday.

In South Dakota, Senator Tim Johnson, a Democratic incumbent who nearly died of a brain hemorrhage two years ago, easily won re-election.

While Democrats had hoped for an extensive sweep that would leave them with a 60-vote majority in the Senate, giving them the power to cut off filibusters, Congressional leaders and other experts had cautioned that even if they reached that threshold, there was no guarantee they would be able to hold their caucus together on every issue. Liberal Democrats like Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin often disagree sharply with more conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

On the other hand, falling two or three votes short of 60 votes would not prevent the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, from reaching out to moderate Republicans like Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine in an effort to bridge the gap.





By David M. Herszenhorn, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

House Democrats expanded their numbers on Tuesday, giving Speaker Nancy Pelosi more maneuvering room as she seeks to forge ahead with the agenda of President-elect Barack Obama.

The full extent of the gains was uncertain early Wednesday, but it appeared that Democrats would fall about a dozen short of the 30 or more additional seats that analysts in both parties said was possible. But with victories in Republican-held districts in Florida, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and elsewhere, Democrats will have a larger majority to work with when the 111th Congress convenes.

With many states still completing their tallies, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the Democrats had netted at least eight additional seats and expected to win several more from Republicans.

"The night is young," he said.

After repeated attempts, Democrats finally defeated Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, toppling the last House Republican in New England. Democrats also defeated Representative Robin Hayes in North Carolina; Tom Feeney and Ric Keller in Florida; Phil English in Pennsylvania; and Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado.

They picked up seats in New York, with the former House staff member Dan Maffei winning a Republican-held seat in the Syracuse area, and were on the verge of gains in Michigan appeared to win two seats vacated by Republicans in New Mexico.

Democrats also gained at least one seat in Mr. Obama's home state, Illinois, where State Senator Debbie Halvorson won an open seat west of Chicago.

"Tonight, the American people have spoken clearly to take our country in a new direction," Ms. Pelosi said as the results rolled in. She said stronger majorities in the House and Senate should "increase bipartisanship, civility and fiscal responsibility."

But Democrats suffered losses as well, losing the Florida seat of Representative Tim Mahoney, who was caught up in a scandal over extramarital affairs. Representative Nick Lampson of Texas, who in 2006 won the heavily Republican district of the former House leader Tom DeLay after Mr. DeLay resigned, was defeated, as was Don Cazayoux of Louisiana, who was elected in a special election earlier this year. Other Democrats were on the cusp of defeat.

One prominent Republican who was well on his way to victory was Representative Don Young, seeking his 19th term as Alaska's only Congressman. With 96 percent of the precincts reporting, he led his Democratic challenger, Ethan Berkowitz, by 52 to 44 percent, The Associated Press reported.

Republicans warned Democrats not to read too much into the results.

"Republicans had a tough night, which was expected," said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. "But Democrats would be making a big mistake if they viewed these results as a repudiation of conservatism or a mandate for big government."

The Democratic gains in both the House and Senate came in some degree from the ranks of more moderate Republicans like Mr. Shays, meaning that the shrunken Republican minority in Congress will be more conservative and potentially more resistant to the Obama agenda.

The outcomes immediately set off repercussions for the Republican leadership. Representative Adam H. Putnam of Florida, the No. 3 Republican in the House, told his colleagues that he would not seek another term in the party leadership.

Exit polls showed that the economy was the overwhelming issue on the minds of voters when they made their choices in Congressional races and that President Bush's unpopularity weighed heavily in their choices as well. Having gained 30 seats to seize control of the House in 2006, Democrats faced a challenge in repeating: parties generally cannot sustain such momentum in two consecutive elections.

But the door opened for Democrats in 2007, when a line of Republican incumbents that ultimately reached more than two dozen began announcing their retirements in states where Democrats could be competitive, including Illinois, New York, Minnesota and Ohio. At the same time, first-term Democrats who should have been at risk after riding the 2006 wave into office were able to position themselves to fend off challenges.

After being hurt in the 2006 election by lawmaker misconduct and corruption, House Republicans continued to be dogged by the issue this year. Representative Rick Renzi of Arizona, having been indicted, was forced to abandon any re-election plans, providing Democrats an opportunity in that state, and Representative Don Young of Alaska remained under investigation.

Republicans got a sense of their predicament early in the year when Democrats took over three solidly Republican seats in special elections - one in the Illinois district of former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and two others in conservative Louisiana and Mississippi. The victories, which made the Democrats' House majority 236 to 199, sapped Republican morale, bolstered Democratic fund-raising and emboldened the party to go after Republicans in what would normally have been considered hostile territory.

During a summer notable for record oil prices, Republicans fought back. For a time, they had Democrats on the defensive over the rising cost of gasoline, arguing that the majority party had allied with environmental groups to keep much of the nation's coastline off limits to exploration, increasing American reliance on foreign oil and crimping family finances.

The clash, which prompted the Republican slogan "Drill, baby, drill," had special resonance because Ms. Pelosi had been a longtime prominent opponent of drilling.

Under pressure, Ms. Pelosi and her fellow Democrats relented in September and agreed to allow some offshore drilling. A catchall spending measure ultimately lifted the drilling ban altogether, though Democrats may try to reinstate it next year. The repeal, combined with a new decline in gasoline prices, drained much of the momentum from what had been a winning issue for Republicans.

At the same time, Republicans were cuffed by a faltering economy. By September, what had started as a housing downturn was an all-out economic crisis, with the government taking over mortgage finance companies and a major insurer, credit markets seizing up and the stock market going into a tailspin along with Americans' savings and retirement accounts.

Both parties say the political bottom seemed to fall out for Republicans as Congress considered a $700 billion financial-industry bailout, pushed by the Bush administration. House Republicans played a crucial role in killing the first version of the bill, though a revised bailout passed on a second attempt.

Lawmakers found that while many voters did not favor what they saw as a rescue for Wall Street firms, they also wanted Congress to stop the drain on their retirement and college savings plans.




By Carl Hulse, The New York Times, November 5, 2008

Democrats won the governor's office in Missouri, where Attorney General Jay Nixon rode to victory on Tuesday with a scathing critique of Republican control under Gov. Matt Blunt, who chose not to run for a second term. Mr. Nixon defeated Kenny Hulshof, a Republican congressman.

The race, which flipped a seat from Republican to Democratic control, was one of the most closely watched governor's contests in a year when the 11 state races drew little attention.

Democrats held 28 governor's chairs going into Tuesday, to 22 for the Republicans.

But in a shot of good news for Republicans, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who had been challenged by the resurgent Democrats and tough economic times in his state, held on to win election over Jill Long Thompson, a Democrat and former United States representative.

Many of the early victories in the night went to Democrats.

One of them, Lt. Gov. Beverly Eaves Perdue of North Carolina, won election to the top job over Mayor Pat McCrory of Charlotte, a Republican who argued that 15 years of Democratic control of the governor's office was enough. The incumbent, Michael F. Easley, is leaving because of term-limit rules, and the race was a toss-up for most of the campaign.

In New Hampshire, Gov. John Lynch easily won a third two-year term over a state senator, Joseph D. Kenney, who tried and failed to convince voters that New Hampshire under Mr. Lynch was losing its flinty New England character. Mr. Kenney, a military veteran who served in Iraq, pledged to cut the number of cellphones issued to state employees as part of his get-tough-on-spending plans.

In West Virginia, Gov. Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, won re-election to a second term, easily defeating a former state senator, Russ Weeks.

In Delaware, the Democratic state treasurer, Jack Markell, also was elected. He had upended his own party's plans for the race by challenging and beating the lieutenant governor, John Carney, who had been groomed for office by the incumbent, Ruth Ann Minner. Governor Minner was prevented by a term limits law from running again.

Mr. Markell, who defeated Bill Lee, a Republican and former judge, will become the first Jewish governor in Delaware history.

Two Republican incumbents, Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah and Gov. John Hoeven of North Dakota, also won re-election, as did Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, in Montana. All three are popular, and they highlighted their state's economic performances, which compared favorably with their neighbors.

Mr. Hoeven, in winning a third four-year term, became the first governor in North Dakota history to push past eight years in office. He defeated Tim Mathern, a Democrat and 22-year veteran of the State Senate, who has a classic North Dakota pedigree as the great-grandson of homesteaders and who grew up on a dairy farm with 12 brothers and sisters.

Mr. Schweitzer, who narrowly won his first term in 2004, has become a spokesman for the Western Democrats who have made inroads from Wyoming to Colorado. He defeated Roy Brown, a Republican state senator from Billings. Mr. Brown, a petroleum engineer, campaigned on a pledge to reduce the role of government in people's lives.

Mr. Huntsman, a former United States trade representative who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese - partly from his experience as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - coasted to re-election in Utah over Bob Springmeyer, a Democrat and management consultant.

All the incoming governors will have to deal with tough economic challenges. New Hampshire, for example, faces a budget deficit of $160 million, almost 10 percent of the general revenue budget.

In Indiana, the economy was a major issue. Mr. Daniels argued that the state was suffering less than its neighbors, and that he deserved credit. Ms. Thompson pointed to the state's housing foreclosures, which were higher than the national average.

In Missouri, Mr. Nixon benefited from having a much longer lead time in his campaign. He was the favorite to win his party's nomination even before Governor Blunt's surprise announcement earlier this year that he would not seek re-election, which left the Republicans scrambling to find a candidate.

Mr. Nixon, who was the longest-serving attorney general in state history, cast Mr. Hulshof as a Washington insider who had been tainted by his time in Congress.

"Jay was well known and thought of; he jumped out early, and worked hard over last year, year and a half," said Mr. Manchin, who is the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

In his own race, Mr. Manchin portrayed himself as a local boy - an avid outdoorsman and motorcyclist, and a native of a coal mining town whose grandparents had immigrated from Italy - who knew his state, but who also had a vision beyond it, in energy and education policy.

In Delaware, Mr. Markell campaigned heavily on health care. He highlighted his work as state treasurer in reducing health insurance costs by encouraging healthier behavior and lifestyles for state employees. He also portrayed himself as something of an efficiency expert, touting his success in saving money for the state through bulk purchases.




By Kirk Johnson, The New York Times, November 4, 2008

Barack Obama will take office in 76 days, but the moves he begins making today will immediately begin to define his presidency.

He is expected to name a White House chief of staff in the next day or two, and the clear front-runner is Rep. Rahm Emanuel, his longtime friend and ally from Chicago. He will officially begin a transition operation under the direction of another Clinton administration official, former White House chief of staff John D. Podesta. Those and other prominent Democrats, many of them veterans of his two-year quest for the presidency, will be charged with assembling an administration that draws from the innovations of Obama's campaign and sets in motion a system to deliver on the promises that got him elected.

One Obama source familiar with the transition process said the goal is to move "quickly, but not hastily." The approach to appointments and other senior hires will be comprehensive, as opposed to ad hoc, which may mean that Obama will not name, say, a Treasury secretary right away but will continue to rely in the short term on his current economic advisory team. A game plan for moving forward will become clear by Friday, Obama sources said, and Cabinet announcements may start to trickle out next week.

Obama is expected to continue operating out of Chicago for most of the transition. The process of vetting and assembling a Cabinet began well before yesterday's election, with staff members hinting at the potential for several "outside the box" picks for top jobs. Aides will move quickly to begin monitoring the government's various departments and agencies, obtain the necessary security clearances, and keep a close eye on any last-minute attempts by current administration officials to leave a mark on policy after President Bush's term ends.

But Obama's effort to create a smooth transition that puts his stamp on government will face major tests almost immediately. Congress will convene for a lame-duck session on Nov. 17, and the junior senator from Illinois will have to decide whether to become immersed in its proceedings or keep his distance, as some allies are advising.

The White House will hold an economic summit on Nov. 15 that 20 world leaders will attend; Obama, who called for such a meeting in September, has been invited to participate. His advisers are also debating whether to ask Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to stay on, to allow planning for a withdrawal from Iraq to begin as soon as possible. A U.N. conference on global warming will be held in Poland in December, an ideal stage for Obama, or a high-profile surrogate such as former vice president Al Gore, to declare that the era of Bush energy policies are over.

Obama remains largely a stranger to the vast federal bureaucracy and will be besieged by Washington insiders he barely knows -- and whose loyalties are untested -- seeking positions of influence.

"He was extremely good at running for office, but there's no way to predict what comes next," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar with the Brookings Institution. "There's no school for presidents. A lot of this is on-the-job training, and we take a lot on faith."

Obama's aides hope his transition operation will be a sharp contrast with the chaotic operation that President-elect Bill Clinton ran in 1992. Clinton did not pick anyone, either for a Cabinet or White House position, until the sixth week of his transition, and he named much of his top White House staff on Jan. 15, just five days before his inauguration -- far too late for them to learn the contours of the jobs they were about to undertake.

Avoiding the same mistakes is one reason Obama is eager to have the hard-nosed Emanuel become the White House gatekeeper. (Podesta, former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle and ex-commerce secretary William M. Daley remain other possibilities if Emanuel unexpectedly says no.) The Chicago lawmaker, elected in 2002, moved rapidly up the House leadership ladder and aspires to become speaker. Obama would be asking Emanuel to give up that ambition because he believes that his tenure in the Clinton White House, combined with his Capitol Hill experience, make him uniquely qualified for the job, sources close to Obama said. Emanuel has wrestled in recent days over whether to take the job, sources close to him said.

The transition process started quietly about 10 weeks ago, when Obama asked Podesta to begin a full-scale review of the federal government and to compile lists of potential hires. Podesta, who now runs the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank, created a transition board that included Clinton administration alumni, CAP colleagues and several of Obama's outside advisers. Obama has participated little in this exercise beyond urging aides to look at all sorts of candidates, including Republicans (retiring Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is most often mentioned) and individuals from the business community.

Among those under consideration who would mark a departure from the tradition of rewarding loyalists and party leaders include New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein for education secretary and retired Marine Corps commandant Jim Jones for national security adviser. Both are viewed as non-ideological and have the potential to rankle liberal Democrats. Obama officials said they would look at innovative firms such as Google for potential applicants. One prospect for a top administration job, possibly at the Office of Management and Budget, who would test the Washington establishment is Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), a crusader for government reform who annually publishes a dire alternative report on the federal budget.

The Obama shortlist includes plenty of traditional names: former Treasury secretaries Lawrence H. Summers or Robert E. Rubin could be tapped for that post again. Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is another possibility. Alternatives to Jones include Susan Rice and James B. Steinberg, Obama advisers who also served under Clinton. Eric H. Holder Jr., another Clinton veteran and Obama friend, is a candidate for attorney general, as is Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. Other prominent women likely to be approached for Cabinet posts include Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm

Obama will also have to decide what roles many of his top political aides might play in the White House, such as campaign manager David Plouffe, chief strategist David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs and Dan Pfeiffer, who led his communications team. Plouffe, for one, has announced internally that he will return to private life, at least for the time being.

While Obama contemplates how to fill the top jobs, Podesta and his team will size up the bureaucracies these individuals would inherit.

One group, led by Donald Gips, former domestic policy adviser to Gore, and Melody Barnes, a CAP senior executive, is overseeing an agency-by-agency review that will be conducted on-site by small teams. Their aim is to identify budget issues, administrative problems and policy priorities, and their findings will be presented in written reports to every Obama Cabinet secretary and administrator.

Separate policy working groups are evaluating Obama campaign promises in the context of current budget realities. One team, chaired by Steinberg and including Rice and Harvard University professor Sarah Sewall, is evaluating international scenarios that Obama may confront.

Former Treasury official Michael Froman and CAP senior executive Cassandra Q. Butts, both Obama friends from Harvard Law School, are examining personnel issues related to sub-Cabinet positions, including diversity, something Obama and his team are determined to provide. Butts, who is a lawyer, is also vetting potential candidates for ethical conflicts.

Now that the transition is an official government operation, the structure is expected to shift to a three-member board consisting of Podesta, who would oversee the ongoing agency-review process; Pete Rouse, Obama's Senate chief of staff and senior campaign adviser, who would help the new chief of staff to organize the White House; and Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend who was also on the campaign team, who will act as conduit to Obama, among other tasks.

While that process unfolds, Obama will rely on advisory groups that have guided him through the campaign. Former Treasury secretaries Rubin and Summers, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker and others are helping Obama navigate the nation's economic crisis and coordinate with Bush officials on further government interventions. A similar group will guide him on foreign policy. Obama gathered some of its members in Richmond shortly before the election to discuss the national security implications of the economic situation.

The transition team is exploring new approaches to communications that could undercut West Wing traditions such as the daily briefings to reporters, including making more announcements over the Internet to ensure that information reaches not only journalists but the millions of individuals who enlisted in Obama's campaign and consider themselves invested in his presidency.

Obama is also expected to follow through on his pledge to restrict the role of lobbyists in his administration. Campaign lawyer Robert F. Bauer, a potential White House counsel, has been at work on a code of conduct. Said one senior Obama adviser: "People are going to be surprised at how strict we are."

By Shailagh Murray, The Washington Post, November 5, 2008

On a wall next to Harlem's historic Apollo Theater, near a painting of Malcolm X, a new canvas hung last night -- a huge likeness of Barack Obama and the words: "We Made History 2008."

As night fell in the cultural capital of black America, the election of the nation's first black president was hailed as the coming of a savior. "I didn't think I'd see this," said one resident, Antoinette Moore, 40. "I'm seeing it now and I still don't believe it."

But there was jubilation well beyond Harlem, as the Illinois Democrat sealed his momentous and history-making victory. From New York to California to Washington, D.C., tens of thousands of voters wept, cheered and danced in the streets, expressing joy, disbelief and a hard-to-define sense of hope.

"There's something else going on here," said Lois Robson, a 67-year-old nutrition specialist at a senior citizens' recreation center in Santa Monica, Calif. "There's something else going on."

Robson opened and closed her hands while she spoke, as if grasping for what it was.

"It represents a total departure, and a big change," she said. "It will electrify this country, and it will electrify the world. America is reinventing herself again."

"I think a lot of Americans are proud of themselves, that after so many years we can look beyond the color of a man's skin and hear his words," she said. "That's something to be proud of, and I am. I'm proud to be an American."

Several Obama supporters spoke, often emotionally, about how he reminded them of revered Americans of the past -- Martin Luther King Je., John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy.

"To me, he's like JFK," Joanne Cherkas, a 63-year-old nurse in Scranton, Pa., said of Obama. "JFK didn't have all that much experience, and he was young, but he turned this country around."

In Santa Monica, Claudia Schaffer, 61, said Obama recalled Robert Kennedy. "He's the first person since Bobby Kennedy that makes me feel hopeful," she said.

Yet in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna River valley, Scranton retiree Guy Pelosi, 82, had a different view. "I don't trust Obama," he said. "He has a laundry list this long of things he says he'll do. He ain't going to get it all in."

Even as American voters in vast numbers cast their ballots in one of the nation's most historic elections, they brought to a close a long and contentious campaign, one that leaves behind deep partisan wounds that are likely to trouble the country well into the new presidency.

While there was joy and pride in some quarters, there was dismay and resignation in others. There was also the sense that, for all the campaign rhetoric of reaching across the aisle, many partisan divisions remain -- and may have even hardened.

In Houston last night, the Obama victory produced a picture of gloom in some quarters.

At the Westin Galleria, a luxury hotel in a luxury mall in one of the most reliably red states in the union, a Republican Victory Party was hardly that.

The room was alive with politics. Prosperous-looking men in blue shirts and striped ties milled beside women in elaborate coifs and brittle looks.

"It's going to be very painful," Charles Leff, 81, said of an Obama win. He added: "I never would've believed it. Not in my lifetime."

Pat Well, another Republican, said: "This is a very sad night. I think we made some mistakes over the past eight years. We forgot, I think, whence we came. We came out of nowhere 20 years ago to build a party, and people forgot what it takes to build a party."

"There's a lot of pain out there," she said. "It's like the ship is sinking and all the unwilling passengers are going down with it."

Back in Harlem, as state after state fell Obama Blue, the community erupted in celebration, music and chants of "Yes, we can!"

In bars, in soul food restaurants, in impromptu street gatherings and at Harlem's main plaza in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, residents followed the returns on televisions and a huge outdoor screen.

At Sylvia's Also, a well-known lounge, there was clapping and cheering at 7 p.m. when CNN called Vermont the first state for Obama.

The crowd at Sylvia's Also, like the one at the plaza, was mostly black but mixed with whites, Latinos and Asians -- and many journalists, chronicling the results of this historic election.

When the first big round of state projections came out for Obama at 8, a massive roar went out through the lounge. The disc jockey interrupted the broadcast to play the old Staple Singers song "I'll Take You There."

"I always believed Obama would win," said Rob Owens, 47, the night manager at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and an early Obama supporter. "I was with him from the very beginning, since Iowa. It was his message that touched me."

As the key state of Pennsylvania went Obama's way, Elton Bates, 46, said, "It's history, no question about it."

Bates said, "We're at a point of time in history when there's a significant portion of the white majority comfortable with electing a black candidate."

Outside Sylvia's Also, a group of ice sculptors was busy carving Obama's name out of huge blocks of ice.

Thousands more Harlemites, other New Yorkers and foreign tourists packed the plaza to watch CNN on a huge screen. When Ohio was called for Obama, there was a roar and a long chant of "O-ba-ma!" and "Yes, we can!" to the beat of bongo drums. The chant quickly turned to "Yes, we did!"

"It's a beautiful affair!" said Andre Griffith, 54, who had spent most of the afternoon and evening at the plaza to watch the returns come in. "People all around the world wanted to see him win."

As evidence, one group held aloft a makeshift banner that said, "France For Obama."

"It's amazing," Griffith said, shaking his head in incredulity. "It's an historic event."

But across the Appalachian Mountains, at Toot's, a roadhouse-style bar south of Nashville in Murfreesboro, Tenn., cheers and boos erupted as the results came in.

Ken Lipham, a 58-year-old home builder and Army veteran, said he and his family had come to the party because "the food's cheap, the beer's cheap and we get to see the election." A McCain supporter, he did not expect the night to end happily.

By the time CBS's Katie Couric called Ohio for Obama, he and his sons, Andy, 32, and Matt, 34, were already resigned to McCain's defeat. "How can we vote someone into office we don't know anything about?" said Andy, who worries Obama may secretly be a Muslim and may not be a U.S. citizen. "I don't trust him, and all the personal relationships he has."

That's when his father -- who said he shared the same doubts about Obama -- broke in with a little perspective. "It doesn't matter who wins the election. Democrat or Republican, it's still America," he said. "You have to be supportive of the U.S."

In rainy North Carolina last night, there were sullen faces and a bit of pouting at a sparse GOP party in the grand ballroom of the North Raleigh Hilton.

"Are you going to stay much longer?" one young woman sipping white wine asked her friend soon after television stations called the state's U.S. Senate race for Democrat Kay Hagan, who ousted Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

McCain worker Amy Crowe, 21, a college senior, said of Obama: "All of his policies are just reaching into my pocket. I just don't trust him. I don't think he has nearly enough experience. I know he picked an experienced vice presidential candidate, but that's not enough. I question his patriotism and, honestly, his political motives. He just came on the scene from nowhere. He hasn't proven to me that he is presidential material."

Carol Bennett, 65, a Republican candidate for a local state Senate seat, said Obama worries her. "Lawyers are trained to say what they have to say to get what they want," she said. "Is he sincere? I don't know. I don't think he will be all that effective because he will be lost in the woods."

Voters in Scranton cast their ballots under gray skies, symbolic of the city's political divisions.

In Whistle's Pub, on a downtown street of boarded-up storefronts, as results last night showed Pennsylvania swing toward Obama, Larry Falduto, 47, a McCain supporter, remarked: "It can't be true. I'm going home now." Then he walked out the door.

Sean Frost, 23, another disgruntled McCain supporter, said, "They elected a terrorist."

Earlier in the day, Paul Fuller, 48, a laborer and musician, said he initially supported Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton but switched to McCain.

"I grew up here, in an Italian-Irish neighborhood, and I'm Scottish-Irish," Fuller said. "There are not many African Americans in this section of town. I started thinking, 'If there's blacks voting for Obama just because he's black, I'll vote for McCain just because he's white.' But I always try to be educated and learn just what their visions are."

McCain backer Mary Salamone, 86, a lifelong Democrat, said she voted for a Republican for president for the first time. "I have nothing against the colored people, they're very nice," she said. "It's him I don't trust."

Brad Burgess, a college professor who said he was "passionately pro-life," said that in the event of an Obama victory, he planned to pray for the president daily. "He's our president and leader," Burgess said. "He makes decisions that affect us all."

As the evening closed in the Tennessee roadhouse, the mood seemed to change. Beer mugs were raised to the new president.

At one table, students Kirk Sudeuth and Courtney Rynd sat with their friends. Sudeuth had voted for McCain; Rynd for independent candidate Ralph Nader. But both acknowledged that something historic had just happened in the country.

"I'm interested to see what'll happen in the next few years," Sudeuth said. "I'll be in full support of the president. I'm all about a unified country."

"This is the most excited I've been in a long time," Rynd said. "I'm excited to be a part of this."

In building his sweeping electoral majority yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama capitalized on a tidal wave of disenchantment with President Bush, deep worry about the economy, and seismic demographic shifts away from the Republican Party among young people, Hispanics and college-educated voters.

As expected, the election appeared to produce record turnout, with long lines outside polling stations in many states, on top of record-breaking early voting, in which roughly a third of eligible voters cast their ballots before Election Day. In North Carolina alone, turnout increased from 54 percent to 61 percent of the electorate -- about 800,000 voters. But exit polls suggested that Obama was able to win with a less dramatic surge in young voters and African Americans than many had expected.

Instead, he constructed a much further-reaching coalition, based above all on a rejection of the Republican brand of the last eight years and a desire for change. Thirty-two percent of voters in last night's preliminary exit poll results described themselves as Republicans, compared with 40 percent who identified themselves as Democrats. Four years ago, the numbers for the two parties were equal.

The shift away from the Republicans did not appear to signify an ideological shift toward the left. The proportion of voters describing themselves as liberal, moderate and conservative stayed roughly the same compared with four years ago. The number of those who said they thought the government should be more active was only slightly higher than in 2004; nonetheless, more than 40 percent still thought government was doing too much.

But if the electorate showed some of the usual fissures over how to move forward in a difficult time, it was in widespread agreement over what it did not want: a continuation of Republican Party rule in the White House. That was a judgment Sen. John McCain was unable to escape, despite repeated attempts to separate himself from Bush. Among independents, Obama scored a six-point advantage. And nearly one in five voters who voted for Bush in 2004 said they went for Obama, double the proportion of John F. Kerry's voters in 2004 who voted yesterday for McCain.

Although ideological identification appeared stable, there were significant shifts in the demographic undercurrents. Two-thirds of the Hispanic vote went to Obama, compared with 53 percent for Kerry in the last presidential race -- despite many worries among Democrats that Obama would not be able to win over Hispanic voters who had favored Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primary season.

The Hispanic margin represents a particular blow to the Bush coalition -- Bush and his advisers had taken pride in building up their share of the Hispanic vote to 44 percent in 2004. But Hispanics have since been moving away from Republicans amid the often-harsh debate over immigration reform.

Of the three-quarters of the electorate who were white, the early exit polls showed that about 43 percent voted for Obama, roughly in line with the white vote for Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000 and Bill Clinton in 1996.

But Obama nearly tied with McCain among white voters who had some college education, a group Bush won in 2004 by 11 points. This suggested acceleration of a trend that has been underway for at least a decade, as more and more college-educated white suburban professionals have been moving toward the Democrats. This improved showing by Obama was particularly relevant in Virginia and Colorado, the only two of the 10 states in the country with the highest rates of college education that Kerry lost.

Obama's strong performance with college-educated whites helped explain how he was able to build a lead despite faring relatively poorly among white voters without a college education. He lost this group by 18 points -- a small improvement over Kerry's performance. But the group's share of the electorate dropped by four points and he was able to hold his losses with the group to a manageable level. Some of the credit may belong to union voters in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Democrats had worried about his prospects. Union members voted for Obama at the same rate as they had for Kerry, about 60 percent.

As expected, Obama won nearly the entire African American vote, about 95 percent, compared with the 88 percent share that Kerry won. With turnout up overall, the surge in black turnout resulted in only a two-point increase in the black proportion of the electorate, from 11 percent to 13 percent. Overall, only about one in 10 voters said race was an important factor in deciding whom to pick -- and a majority of them voted for Obama.

McCain's diminished performance among minority voters underscored the challenge for Republicans in a country that is expected to lose its white majority by 2042. Exit polls also indicated a widening generation gap. Although the share of younger voters did not surge over 2004's figure, the rate of voters younger than 30 who voted for the Democrats increased to 66 percent, a 12-point increase. But among voters older than 65, McCain improved slightly on Bush's performance.

As a debate was breaking out yesterday among McCain advisers over Gov. Sarah Palin's role in the campaign's struggles, exit polls suggested that McCain's running mate had not helped in a broad swath of the electorate. About 60 percent of voters questioned by exit pollsters said they thought Palin was not qualified to be vice president. She did not appear to have helped McCain with women -- a portion of the electorate Obama won by 13 percentage points overall while losing white women by 7 points. Both were improvements over Kerry's numbers.

Palin may have helped, however, in maintaining the Republican hold on white evangelical Christian voters. Despite attempts to cut into this base, Obama managed to improve on Kerry's performance with this group by only four points. Despite worries among Democrats about Obama's chances with Jewish voters, he won more than three-quarters of them, a slight improvement over Kerry. He also improved slightly with white Catholic voters -- although McCain held a narrow majority, which would represent the first time that white Catholics did not side with the winner since exit polling began in 1972.

The discontent in the electorate was palpable. About a quarter of voters said they approved of Bush's job performance, half as many as did when he ran for reelection four years ago. Of the 72 percent who disapproved, two-thirds voted for Obama. Only a fifth of voters thought the country was on the right track, compared with roughly half in 2004.

McCain spent much of the campaign trying to disassociate himself from Bush, proclaiming in his final debate with Obama: "I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." But when exit pollsters asked voters whether they thought McCain would continue Bush's policies or take the country in a new direction, half of them said McCain would continue on Bush's path. And of those voters, nine in 10 voted for Obama.

Obama led by nine points among the nearly two-thirds of voters who said the economy was the most important issue facing the country. Half of voters said the economy was in "poor" shape, the worst of four options they were given, which was triple the rate four years ago, and Obama appeared to have won two-thirds of them. More than 40 percent of voters said their finances were worse off than four years ago, compared with a quarter who said that in 2004. Seven in 10 of them voted for Obama.




By Alec MacGillis and Jon Cohen, The Washington Post, November 5, 2008

Obama Succeeded in Redrawing Electoral Map

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was elected the nation's 44th president yesterday, riding a reformist 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.

Standing before a crowd of more than 125,000 people who had waited for hours at Chicago's Grant Park, Obama acknowledged the accomplishment and the dreams of his supporters.

"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," he said just before midnight Eastern time.

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you: We as a people will get there." After the speech he was joined on stage by vice president-elect Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (Del.) and both their families.

The historic Election Day brought millions of new and sometimes tearful voters, long lines at polling places nationwide, and celebrations on street corners and in front of the White House. It ushered in a new era of Democratic dominance in Congress, even though the party appeared unlikely to meet its goal of capturing the 60 Senate votes needed for a filibuster-proof majority. In the House, Democrats made major gains, adding to their already sizable advantage and returning them to a position of power that predates the 1994 Republican revolution.

Democrats will use their new legislative muscle to advance an economic and foreign policy agenda that Bush has largely blocked for eight years. Even when the party seized control of Congress two years ago, its razor-thin margin in the Senate had allowed Republicans to hinder its efforts.

McCain congratulated Obama in a phone call shortly after 11 p.m. and then delivered a gracious concession speech before his supporters in Phoenix. "We have had and argued our differences," he said of his rival, "and he has prevailed."

"This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African Americans and the special pride that must be theirs tonight," McCain said.

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 Democrat easily won most of the Northeast, the Rust Belt, the West Coast and mid-Atlantic states that normally back Democrats. By midnight, he appeared to be running strong in North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri and Montana, each of which was too close to call. Obama ultimately won in Indiana, bringing his electoral college total to 349, while McCain won Montana, bringing his total to 163 electoral college votes. The outcome in North Carolina and Missouri remained uncertain.

Obama melded the pride and aspirations of African Americans with a coalition of younger and disaffected voters drawn to his rhetorical style, and a unified base of Democrats worried about the economy and frustrated with the war in Iraq.

He is the fifth-youngest man elected to a first presidential term, after Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Ulysses S. Grant. He is the 16th senator to ascend to the office, and the first since Kennedy's election in 1960.

Bush called Obama at 11:12 p.m. to offer his congratulations, the White House said.

"Mr. President-elect, congratulations to you," Bush said, according to the White House. "What an awesome night for you, your family and your supporters. Laura and I called to congratulate you and your good bride."

He added: "I promise to make this a smooth transition. You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations, and go enjoy yourself."

The election was in many respects a referendum on the two-term president, whose popularity has plunged to the lowest levels since the 1930s, because of his administration's handling of the economy, Hurricane Katrina, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush has not been seen with McCain since May, and the president has made no public appearances since late last week.

McCain's top strategist acknowledged the team's difficulties as the candidate returned to Arizona from his final campaign stop in New Mexico.

"I think we did our absolute best in this campaign in really difficult circumstances. We had a -- we had some tough cards to play all the way through and we hung in there all the way," senior adviser Steve Schmidt told reporters.

He added: "I don't think there's another Republican the party could have nominated that could have made this a competitive race the way that John McCain did. . . . The president's approval numbers, you know, were not helpful in the race but the party as a whole is unpopular with the American people, and that was a big albatross."

During a sometimes chaotic race, McCain promised voters that he would reform a broken and corrupted Washington and bring change that he said the American people demand. But his economic and national security proposals largely echoed Bush's policies, a charge that Obama made repeatedly.

Republicans watched yesterday as the electoral map turned blue in places where they have labored for a decade to cultivate a permanent, conservative voter base that would ensure presidential victories.

The party -- now clearly a minority one -- is left wondering whether the Democratic rout is the result of a coincidental marriage of a powerful personality and a terrible political and economic environment or if it signals a deeper change in voter patterns and beliefs that will make it difficult for them to recapture the White House for years.

"This election, particularly when combined with the '06 election, means the GOP is in serious trouble," said Peter Wehner, a former Bush White House aide. "To deny that would be to deny reality."

Wehner said the party can take some comfort in "the fact that I suspect the data will show that America remains, on the issues, a center-right nation. . . . It means the core political philosophy that defines the GOP is not out of sync with the country."

In a sign that Obama's race did not hold him back, he won as large a share of the white vote as any Democrat in the past two decades, although he still fell short of a majority. Preliminary exit polls showed him winning among 43 percent of white voters, while Sen. John F. Kerry won 41 percent in 2004 and Vice President Al Gore won 42 percent in 2000.

McCain styled himself as a maverick but ran a largely traditional Republican campaign that eroded his brand among independents, the majority of whom voted for Obama yesterday. Obama won 60 percent of self-described moderates, who had once formed the core of McCain's support.

Obama appeared to have made huge gains among Hispanic voters, earning about two-thirds of their support, according to exit polls. He also captured 95 percent of black voters. Obama also won a majority of women and took the support of 49 percent of men.

McCain appeared to have performed more poorly than his GOP predecessors, especially among young people. He earned about 30 percent of voters aged 18 to 29; in 2004, Bush captured 45 percent of that group.

The Obamas, with their two daughters in tow, voted yesterday morning at Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, in their Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. (Controversial former radical William Ayers, whose relationship with Obama became a staple of McCain-Palin speeches, voted earlier at the same precinct, but ignored reporters' questions about his ballot.)

Daughter Malia, 10, was by Michelle Obama's side when she cast her ballot, while Sasha, 7, watched her father vote.

"The journey ends, but voting with my daughters, that was a big deal," Obama said later. "I noticed that Michelle took a long time, though. I had to check to see who she was voting for."

The simple act of voting was a prosaic close to the longest and most expensive presidential election in U.S. history, one that fundamentally changed national politics in communication strategy and voter outreach.

Obama's unilateral decision to forgo public financing for his campaign may signal the end of that Watergate-era reform, as McCain found himself massively outspent.

By mid-October, Obama had reported raising nearly $600 million, including a record-shattering $150 million in September. Combined with money the Democratic National Committee spent during the general election, he spent nearly $745 million on his primary and general-election campaigns.

The combined spending figure for McCain and the Republican Party was nearly $450 million by mid-October.

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.

McCain criticized Obama's summer tours of Afghanistan and Iraq as too little too late, and he mocked the lavish reception the Democrat received in the Middle East and Europe. McCain even ran an ad of a rally Obama held before 200,000 people in Berlin, with an announcer saying: "He's the biggest celebrity in the world."

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.

When the financial meltdown on Wall Street began in mid-September, McCain's advisers winced as their candidate told an audience in Jacksonville, Fla., that the "fundamentals of the economy are sound." Just hours later in Orlando, the candidate declared the economy in "crisis."

Such trepidation did not serve McCain well -- at one point, as Congress dealt with a $700 billion rescue plan for Wall Street, he suspended his campaign to fly back to Washington -- and Obama seemed to find traction with voters by declaring his rival's actions "erratic."

Obama emerged as the Democratic nominee from the crucible of the longest-ever nomination fight.

But Obama stunned Sen. Clinton, and the nation, by repeatedly demolishing assumptions about his ability to raise money, his organizational strength and his ability to appeal to white voters. Those three factors came together in Iowa, as he won a convincing victory in the state's Democratic caucuses.

His one-time rival worked hard for his election and Clinton said last night: "We are celebrating an historic victory for the American people. This was a long and hard-fought campaign, but the result was well worth the wait."

By Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post, November 5, 2008

CHICAGO - After eight years of Republican rule, Barack Obama turned Wednesday to the task of building a Democratic administration to lead the country out of war and into the financial recovery that he promised.

Obama planned to spend the rest of the week at home in Chicago, turning in earnest to reviewing the hiring decisions he'll have to make in the next two-and-a-half months. Campaign advisers have already presented him with names to review for key positions, but they said he wasn't focused on filling the jobs before winning the election.

A top priority, the advisers said, would be picking a White House chief of staff to help manage the selections to come. Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel appeared headed for the job, said Democrats who spoke on condition of anonymity before the announcement, expected as early as Wednesday.

Obama also faces intensive national security briefings that will prepare him to take over as commander in chief.

"We know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century," Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park. "There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created, new schools to build and threats to meet and, for us to lead, alliances to repair."

He said the solutions wouldn't be quick or easy - perhaps not even achievable with one term. "I promise you - we as a people will get there," Obama said.

Obama planned to keep a low profile on his first full day as president-elect, aides said. Obama had told reporters over the weekend that he'd hold a press conference Wednesday, but the campaign staff later walked that back and said it would be more likely to come by the end of the week.

There were more personal decisions to be made, too, like when to move his family to Washington and where his 10- and 7-year-old daughters will go to school. Obama also was expected to take time to mourn his grandmother, who died Sunday before she could see the grandson she helped raise achieve his dream. Obama could be considering a return to his native Hawaii for the small private ceremony that she requested be held later.

In a congratulatory call to Obama, President Bush pledged to make a smooth transition and extended an invitation to the Obama family to visit the White House soon.

And then there was the matter of the family pet. "Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House," he told his daughters in his victory speech.

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press, November 5, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama rode a wave of voter discontent to an historic White House victory, promising change as the first black U.S. president but facing enormous challenges from a deep economic crisis and two lingering wars.

Obama led Democrats to a sweeping victory that expanded their majorities in both houses of Congress as Americans emphatically rejected Republican President George W. Bush's eight years of leadership.

Raucous street celebrations erupted across the country, but Obama will have little time to enjoy the victory. He was expected to start work on Wednesday, planning his formal takeover on January 20 and assembling a team to tackle the financial crisis and other challenges.

Democrats gained at least five Senate seats and about 25 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a commanding majority in Congress and strengthening Obama's hand. Four Senate seats remained undecided.

The son of a black father from Kenya and white mother from Kansas, Obama was born when black Americans were still battling segregationist policies in the South. His triumph over Republican rival John McCain on Tuesday is a milestone that could help the United States get beyond its long, brutal history of racism.

"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, at this defining moment, change has come to America," Obama, 47, told some 240,000 ecstatic supporters gathered in Chicago's Grant Park.

Many world leaders welcomed Obama's victory and some hailed it as an opportunity to restore a tarnished U.S. image.

"Your election has raised enormous hope in France, in Europe and beyond," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

Newspaper headlines captured the momentous nature of the result. A New York Times banner headline said simply "OBAMA", while the Washington Post declared "Obama Makes History" and USA Today: "America makes history; Obama wins".

Initial market reaction was muted. Analysts said Obama's victory had been largely priced in and concerns about the global economy were paramount, leading major U.S. stock index futures lower. The dollar moved higher, recovering some of the previous session's heavy losses.

OBAMA FACES BIG PRESSURES

Obama won at least 349 Electoral College votes, based on state voting, far more than the 270 he needed. With 96 percent of the popular vote counted, he led McCain by 52 percent to 46 percent.

He will face intense pressure to deliver on his campaign promises. He has vowed to restore U.S. leadership in the world by working closely with foreign allies, to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the first 16 months of his term and to bolster U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan.

But his immediate task will be tackling the U.S. financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression. Obama has proposed another stimulus package that could cost about $175 billion and include funding for infrastructure and another round of rebate checks.

World leaders will gather in Washington on November 15 for a summit on the global financial meltdown. The White House has said it did not expect the president-elect to attend, but Obama has not yet stated his plans.

A first-term Illinois senator who will now be the 44th U.S. president, Obama said he would work to ease the country's sharp political divisions and listen to those who voted against him.

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there," he said in Chicago.

McCain, a 72-year-old Arizona senator and former Vietnam War prisoner, called Obama to congratulate him and praised his inspirational and precedent-shattering campaign.

"I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him but offering our next president our goodwill," McCain said.

ELATION IN THE STREETS

Blacks and whites celebrated together in front of the White House to mark Obama's win and Bush's imminent departure. Cars jammed downtown Washington streets, with drivers honking their horns and leaning out their windows to cheer.

Thousands more joined street celebrations in New York's Times Square and in cities and towns across the country.

"This is the most significant political event of my generation," said Brett Schneider, 23, who was in the crowd for Obama's victory speech in Chicago.

"This is a great night. This is an unbelievable night," said U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who was brutally beaten by police in Selma, Alabama, during a civil rights march in the 1960s.

Lewis was at a celebration in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the home church of Martin Luther King, who led the civil rights movement and was murdered in 1968.

Allied governments said they hoped for closer cooperation with Washington, while critics of the United States, ranging from officials in Russia and Iran to Islamist groups in the Middle East, called for changes.

"We hope that ... he adopts a just policy that restores to America its natural position of respect for humankind and democracy," said Mohamed Mahdi Akef, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Middle East's largest Islamist groups.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev spoke of hopes for stronger U.S.-Russian relations, but at the same time vowed retaliation for a U.S. missile-defense plan.

By John Whitesides, Reuters, November 5, 2008

Eleven months ago, I attended a John Edwards speech in the little town of Algona, Iowa. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Edwards had drawn a large crowd of mostly uncommitted voters to a local factory that made wind-turbine components. Two things soon became apparent as I interviewed a dozen or so Algonans before the speech. The first was that there were a fair number of Republicans present, a phenomenon I was beginning to notice all over Iowa. They were not yet committed to voting Democratic, but they mentioned their disappointment in George W. Bush, their frustration with the war in Iraq and their dismay with the right-wing religious drift of the state Republican Party. The last time I'd seen so many crossovers was in 1980, when Democrats - angry at Jimmy Carter and their party's leftward drift - made their presence felt at Republican meetings, heralding the onset of the Reagan era.

The other phenomenon was a person. I was talking to a local businessman named Bill Farnham, who wasn't yet sure whom he was voting for, "but I'm really impressed with the organizer Obama sent out here. His name is Nate Hundt, and he's really become part of the community." As he spoke, several other Algonans gathered around and began recounting tales of the young organizer who had come straight to Algona after graduating from Yale six months earlier. Hundt had opened a campaign headquarters in the H&R Block office downtown, joined a local environmental group, shown up for the high school football games. He was a constant presence at civic events. Eventually, Hundt became so much a part of the community that the town leaders asked him to stay on after the caucuses and run for city council. But Hundt had other work to do. The Obama campaign sent him to Colorado, Ohio and North Carolina during the long primary season, then back to Colorado Springs for the general election. "I'm still in touch with my friends from Algona," Hundt said. "In fact, a few of them have come out here to help canvass. But I'm not unique. There are a lot of us who had similar experiences."

Indeed, there are - an army of them, untold thousands of young organizers operating out of more than 700 offices nationwide. And they have delivered a message to Rudy Giuliani, who sneered during the Republican National Convention that he didn't even know "what a community organizer is." This is who they are: they are the people who won this election. They were the heart and sould and backbone of Barack Obama's victory. They are destined to emerge as the next significant generation of American political operatives - similar to the antiwar and antisegregation baby boomers who dominated the Democratic Party after cutting their teeth on the Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy campaigns of 1968, similar to the pro-life, antitax Reaganauts who dominated the Republican Party and American politics from the election of 1980 ... until now. They are a preview of the style and substance of the Obama Administration.

Obama's decision to expend so much effort on a field organization was quietly revolutionary and a perfect fit for the larger political philosophy that he described when I spoke with him a few weeks ago. Obama insisted that while creating a new energy economy was his No. 1 priority, "we can't divorce the energy issue from what I believe has to be the dominant political theme underlying everything - the economy, health care, you name it. And that is restoring a sense that we're growing the economy from the bottom up and not the top down. That's the overarching philosophical change that we've got to have."

That was the substantive heart of his campaign and of this election. It was a stark difference between the candidates. Unlike many elections I've covered where the stakes were small and the differences between the candidates were minor, this was a big election, with big differences between the candidates. It was a referendum on the Reagan era. Try as he might to dissociate himself from the Bush Administration, John McCain remained a classic Reaganite. He believed in the unilateral exercise of American power overseas, with an emphasis on military might rather than diplomacy. He believed in trickle-down, supply-side, deregulatory economics: his tax plan benefited corporations and the wealthy, in the hopes that with fewer shackles, they would create more jobs. Obama was quite the opposite. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose purpose was to humanize Reaganism but not really challenge it, Obama offered a full-throated rebuttal to Clinton's notion that "the era of Big Government is over." He was a liberal, as charged. But the public was ready, after a 30-year conservative pendulum swing, for activist government.

Although McCain gave a gracious concession speech, the old fighter pilot understood that his argument was a loser - perhaps he even understood that the Reagan revolution had run its course - and so his strategy was to make a big election small. He attacked Obama relentlessly, often foolishly, sometimes scurrilously. The public didn't buy it. This was never more apparent than during the three presidential debates, which probably clinched the election for Obama. McCain was starting from a disadvantage. He had developed a bad case of Washingtonitis; he spoke Senatese, a language of process and tactics that sometimes approached incoherence. In 2000, McCain spoke with a bracing clarity. "The reason why we don't have a patients' bill of rights," he would say, "is because the Republican Party is in the pocket of the insurance industry and the Democrats are in the pocket of the trial lawyers." In the 2008 debates, he skittered from attack to attack, lacking the vision and patience to explain what he would actually do as President. Obama's best moments were when he patiently explained what he would do about the economy, health care, education. Those who say Obama won because of the financial crisis are telling only half the story. He won because he reacted to the crisis in a measured, mature way. He won because in the second debate, he explained to a gentleman named Oliver Clark, in terms that anyone could understand, the financial collapse and the need for a federal bailout.

But this election was about much more than issues. It was the ratification of an essential change in the nature of the country. I've seen two others in my lifetime. The election of John Kennedy ratified the new America that had emerged from war and depression - a place where more people owned homes and went to college, a place where young people had the affluence to be idealistic or to rebel, a place that was safe enough to get a little crazy, a sexier country. Ronald Reagan's election was a rebellion against that - an announcement that toughness had replaced idealism overseas, that individual economic freedom had replaced common economic purpose at home. It was an act of nostalgia, harking back to the "real" America - white, homogeneous, small-town - that the McCain campaign unsuccessfully tried to appeal to.

Obama's victory creates the prospect of a new "real" America. We can't possibly know its contours yet, although I suspect the headline is that it is no longer homogeneous. It is no longer a "white" country, even though whites remain the majority. It is a place where the primacy of racial identity - and this includes the old, Jesse Jackson version of black racial identity - has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy. After eight years of misgovernance, it has lost some of its global swagger ... but also some of its arrogance. It may no longer be as dominant, economically or diplomatically, as it once was. But it is younger, more optimistic, less cynical. It is a country that retains its ability to startle the world - and in a good way, with our freedom. It is a place, finally, where the content of our President's character is more important than the color of his skin.

By JOE KLEIN, Time, November 5, 2008

Crowds danced in the streets, wept, lifted their voices in prayer and brought traffic to a standstill. From the nation's capital to Atlanta to Los Angeles, Americans celebrated Barack Obama's victory and marveled that they lived to see the day that a black man was elected president.

Jubilation stretched into the early morning Wednesday in Washington, D.C., and a large crowd paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue with drums, balloons and a life-size cutout of Obama.

By 4 a.m., a few young revelers lingered among the reviewing stands being built for January's presidential inauguration.

"I heard that he won and I instinctively came here," said Hollis Gentry, 45, who lives about six blocks away. "I came down here to make a prayer... that we'll be able to change the nation and the world."

Earlier in Detroit, carloads of celebrants rolled past the bronze sculpture of prizefighter Joe Louis' fist, blaring their horns and chanting "Obama!" out of open windows.

"The history, the struggle, it's been a long time," said Cheryl Stephenson, 48. "People are hurting, not just black people. I think we're ready to take a chance.

"We went from `Yes, we can' to `Yes, we did.'"

In Philadelphia, thousands of blacks and whites converged at City Hall shortly after Obama was declared the winner. Under a light rain, they danced to the music blaring from car radios. Drivers stopped in the middle of the street, opened their car doors and broadcast Obama's acceptance speech.

"Barack is in the house!" shouted Pamela Williams, 46. "This is very important to me. Change is about to happen."

At Sadiki's restaurant in Philadelphia, the celebration poured out onto the sidewalk.

"Our parents left this planet thinking that we would never, ever see this day, when an African-American could be elected by all the people to the highest seat in the land," said Bernard Smalley Sr. His wife, Jacquelyn, wept.

The celebrations were both large big and small, but the sentiment was the same - pure joy over how far the country has come. People honked horns, high-fived each other and embraced.

"I was born in the civil rights time. To see this happening is unbelievable. We've got the first black president. A black president!" said Mike Louis, a 53-year-old black man who got teary-eyed as he watched the election results on a giant video board in Cincinnati's Fountain Square. "It's not cured now, but this is a step to curing this country of racism. This is a big, giant step toward getting this country together."

The roar of thousands of people gathered in a plaza near the legendary Apollo Theater in New York City's Harlem neighborhood could be heard blocks away.

In Cleveland, supporters gathered at a house party and held champagne flutes above their heads for a toast. "To the first African-American president in the history of the United States!" they shouted.

In Chicago, Obama's hometown, an estimated 125,000 people gathered on an unusually warm November night to greet the senator at a delirious victory rally at Grant Park.

"It's fantastic," said Hulon Johnson, 71, a retired Chicago public school principal. "I've always told my kids this was possible; now they'll have to believe me."

LaKeisha Williams, a 27-year-old laid-off school nurse, who watched Obama's victory on a TV in a downtown Kansas City concert hall, said: "People actually have finally come together and realized that no matter what his race is, he was the right person for the job. I think it was destiny for him to win. But now we still have to come together to make sure things work."

In Miami's predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood, Otoria Pitts, 30, suggested the significance of Obama's victory goes beyond race.

"His election speaks volumes for a bunch of people," she said. "Children of single mothers, people who put themselves through college. It says, you can do it, you can do it."

Joined by her sister, Susan, and niece, Akira, the three women bought a few rockets from a fireworks stand and lit up the night sky with color.

On the other side of the country, others were thinking how Obama's election could change their lives.

"I'm ecstatic," said Jason Samm, a 33-year-old business owner who was celebrating in South Los Angeles. "I have three kids, which means a lot of doors opening up for them."

Obama's victory also brought back memories of hard-fought battles of generations past.

At Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights hero, said he was hardly able to believe that 40 years after he was left beaten and bloody on an Alabama bridge as he marched for the right for blacks to vote, he had cast a ballot for Obama.

"This is a great night," he said. "It is an unbelievable night. It is a night of thanksgiving."

As the news of a projected Obama victory flashed across a TV screen, men in the nearly all-black crowd pumped their fists and bowed their heads. Women wept and embraced their children. Screams of "Thank you, Lord!" were heard throughout the sanctuary.

Surveying the scene, Mattie Bridgewater whispered from her seat, "I just can't believe it. Not in my lifetime."

Bridgewater said she went to the same elementary school as Emmett Till, the boy from Chicago whose murder in Mississippi was one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement. Both she and her 92-year-old mother voted for Obama.

"I'm sitting here in awe," she said. "This is a moment in history that I just thank my God I was allowed to live long enough to see. Now, when I tell my students they can be anything they want to be, that includes president of the United States."

By SHARON COHEN, Associated Press, November 5, 2008

PARIS - Barack Obama's election as America's first black president unleashed a global tide of admiration, hopes for change and even renewed love for the United States on Wednesday.

The president of Kenya declared a public holiday in Obama's honor, and people across Africa stayed up all night or woke before dawn to watch U.S. election history being made.

In Indonesia, where Obama lived as child, hundreds of students at his former elementary school erupted in cheers when he was declared winner and poured into the courtyard where they hugged each other, danced in the rain and chanted "Obama! Obama!"

"Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place," South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, said in a letter of congratulations to Obama.

Rama Yade, France's black junior minister for human rights, told French radio: "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes."

Many expressed amazement and satisfaction that the United States could overcome centuries of racial strife and elect an African-American - and one with Hussein as a middle name - as president.

"What an inspiration. He is the first truly global U.S. president the world has ever had," said Pracha Kanjananont, a 29-year-old Thai sitting at a Starbuck's in Bangkok. "He had an Asian childhood, African parentage and has a Middle Eastern name. He is a truly global president."

In an interconnected world where people in its farthest reaches could monitor the presidential race blow-by-blow, many observers echoed Obama's own campaign mantra as they struggled to put into words their sense that his election marked an important turning point.

"I really think this is going to change the world," gushed Akihiko Mukohama, 34, the lead singer of a band that traveled to Obama, Japan, to perform at a promotional event for the president-elect. He wore an "I Love Obama" T-shirt.

The magnitude and emotion of the world reaction illustrated the international character of the U.S. presidency. Many look to Washington as the place where the global issues of war and peace, prosperity or crisis, are decided.

"This is an enormous outcome for all of us," said John Wood, the former New Zealand ambassador to the U.S. "We have to hope and pray that President Obama can move forward in ways which are constructive and beneficial to all of us."

The Vatican said Wednesday it hoped Obama will work to promote peace and justice in the world.

Hopes were also high among those critical of President Bush's policies that an Obama victory would bring in a more inclusive, internationally cooperative U.S. approach. Many cited the Iraq war as the type of blunder Obama was unlikely to repeat.

Indeed, even as they raised expectations, many U.S.-watchers were quick to point out that Obama would have to confront enormous problems once in office: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tenacious difficulties in the Middle East and North Korea, a world economy in turmoil.

Europe, where Obama is overwhelmingly popular, is one region that looked eagerly to an Obama administration for a revival in warm relations after the Bush government's chilly rift with the continent over the Iraq war.

"At a time when we have to confront immense challenges together, your election raises great hopes in France, in Europe and in the rest of the world," French President Nocolas Sarkozy said in a congratulations letter to Obama.

Some South Koreans said they hoped Obama - who has said he favors direct engagement with North Korea - would press North Korean leader Kim Hong Il on human rights issues and the alleged kidnappings of hundreds of South Koreans.

Skepticism, however, was high in the Muslim world. The Bush administration alienated those in the Middle East by mistreating prisoners at its detention center for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and inmates at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison - human rights violations also condemned worldwide.

Some Iraqis, who have suffered through five years of a war ignited by the United States and its allies, said they would believe positive change when they saw it.

"Obama's victory will do nothing for the Iraqi issue nor for the Palestinian issue," said Muneer Jamal, a Baghdad resident. "I think all the promises Obama made during the campaign will remain mere promises."

In Pakistan, a country vital to the U.S.-led war on the al-Qaida terrorist network and neighbor to Afghanistan, many hoped Obama would bring some respite from rising militant violence that many blame on Bush.

Still, Mohammed Arshad, a 28-year-old schoolteacher in the capital, Islamabad, doubted Obama's ability to change U.S. foreign policy dramatically.

"It is true that Bush gave America a very bad name. He has become a symbol of hate. But I don't think the change of face will suddenly make any big difference," he said.

Still, many around the world found Obama's international roots - his father was Kenyan, and he lived four years in Indonesia as a child - compelling and attractive.

Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki declared a public holiday on Thursday in honor of Obama's election victory, and people across Africa stayed up all night or woke before dawn Wednesday to watch the U.S. election results roll in.

"He's in!" said Rachel Ndimu, 23, a business student who joined hundreds of others at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi. "I think this is awesome, and the whole world is backing him."

In Jakarta, hundreds of students at his former elementary school gathered around a television set to watch as results came in, erupting in cheers when he was declared winner and then pouring into the courtyard where they hugged each other and danced in the rain.

"We're so proud!" Alsya Nadin, a spunky 10-year-old in pink-framed glasses, said as her classmates chanted "Obama! Obama!"

By JOHN LEICESTER, Associated Press, November 5, 2008

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- On Sept. 15, John McCain shared with a Miami audience his sense of foreboding at the unraveling of the U.S. financial system, warning that the nation was facing "a strong headwind.''

What the Republican nominee didn't realize was that a headwind was also gathering for his presidential ambitions that would ensure his defeat by Democrat Barack Obama, 47.

McCain's campaign was derailed by the most hostile environment his party has faced in decades, with voters blaming Republicans for the meltdown of the markets, a looming recession and the burden of two wars. His troubles were compounded by his struggle to show leadership during the financial crisis, as well as the compromises he made to secure the nomination, which sullied his "maverick'' image.

"It may have turned out that no Republican could have won,'' said media consultant Mark McKinnon, an unpaid adviser to the campaign.

McCain, speaking to a crowd of supporters in Phoenix after his defeat, said: "It is natural to feel some disappointment tonight. Though we fell short, the failure is mine, not yours.''

When the market crisis reached its flashpoint in September, it crystallized McCain's problems: He was blindsided by events that few economists foresaw, yet his handling of the emergency also stoked doubts about his ability to take charge.

McCain, 72, had sought to calm nerves on Sept. 15 after the government bailed out the nation's largest insurer and the fourth-largest investment bank collapsed by declaring the "fundamentals of our economy are strong.'' Obama pounced, calling him "out of touch,'' and polls showed a growing perception among voters that the Arizona senator was weak on the economy, the issue that mattered the most to them.

A New Race

McCain then suspended his campaign and returned to Washington to help lead a financial rescue, advancing a series of proposals that lacked any organizing principle.

"The September financial crisis totally restructured the presidential race and put McCain and the Republicans forever on the defense,'' said party consultant Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole's 1996 presidential race. "The lead McCain had coming out of the GOP convention vanished and became an afterthought.''

Added Republican strategist John Feehery, "If this were a car race, the financial package was the equivalent of a flat tire that McCain never seemed to be able to recover from.''

Link to Bush

McCain also never recovered from his association with President George W. Bush, who will leave office with some of the lowest job-approval ratings in history.

McCain had spent years cultivating the image of a Washington maverick, having led fights to curb campaign- spending abuses and wasteful congressional pet projects. Then, in a bid to attract the Republican base, he embraced the president's tax cuts and other initiatives. He was also among the most ardent supporters of the war in Iraq.

That enabled Obama to depict McCain as anchored in the policies of the administration and himself as the agent of change.

At the same time, McCain was unable to shake the perception that his campaign was unduly influenced by former lobbyists and Washington insiders, including campaign manager Rick Davis and top adviser Charles Black.

McCain headed into the race believing that unscripted town-hall meetings would be his ticket to victory. He had conducted more than 100 of them in New Hampshire alone, en route to a spectacular comeback there in January's primary. Such gabfests were designed to show off the real McCain -- allowing him to intersperse jokes and snippets of his life story with "straight talk'' about America's problems.

'Double-Edged Sword'

Yet it was during town halls that McCain committed gaffes that would come back to haunt him. One occurred in December, when he said economics was "not something I've understood as well as I should.'' The Democrats used that moment of candor against him for months.

"The town halls were a double-edged sword,'' Reed said. "They allowed him to come back in New Hampshire, but after he became the nominee, he often went off-script and off-message. And that confused voters.''

Other McCain actions fueled skepticism about the man who first limped onto the national stage in 1973 as a celebrated ex-prisoner-of-war.

After losing the Republican nomination in 2000 to Bush, McCain began the 2008 primaries as the frontrunner, backed by the party establishment. The role didn't suit him.

As the oldest White House contender in a crowded field, he touted himself as the steadiest hand on the nation's tiller. That proved a difficult message to sell after he allowed his own campaign to spend into near-bankruptcy by the summer of 2007, while ignoring infighting among top aides.

'No Surrender'

Facing the imminent collapse of his White House run, McCain fired several senior aides, laid off others and launched a "No Surrender'' bus tour that highlighted his call for victory in Iraq and his determination to soldier on with a low- budget, long-shot bid for the nomination.

Focusing almost exclusively on New Hampshire, McCain seemed energized to be rid of his frontrunner's mantle and pressed on with his insurgent campaign.

While his victory there paved the way to his nomination, he failed to prepare for the general-election campaign, even as Senator Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York were still fighting it out for the Democratic nomination.

"McCain had what most presidential campaigns would kill for -- an open field in front of them while two potential opponents were beating the hell out of each other,'' said Reed Galen, McCain's former deputy campaign manager.

It took McCain until May to open a field office in Ohio. "That should have happened on March 1,'' Galen said.

Looking Desperate

For months, McCain also refused to criticize Obama for his past association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor in Chicago. When McCain finally began questioning Obama's links to William Ayers, a former terrorist, the belated attacks "made McCain look desperate,'' Reed said.

McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was also derided by Democrats and even some Republicans as a desperate attempt to hold onto the party's base, because of her anti- abortion views and support for gun rights.

While Palin, 44, galvanized Republican conservatives, her views and tenuous grasp of key issues drove away independents. Her selection also allowed critics to argue that McCain had made a mockery of his "Country First'' motto by naming someone widely regarded as unprepared to be commander-in-chief.

The number of voters with doubts about her qualifications grew as Election Day approached.

Attack Ads

As he sagged in the polls, McCain unleashed blistering attacks on Obama that even some supporters found excessive. One McCain ad falsely claimed Obama had backed "comprehensive sex education'' for kindergartners. On the stump, McCain questioned Obama's patriotism.

It was no small irony that McCain's tactics were the handiwork of campaign operatives who had worked for Bush and whose brass-knuckle tactics had buried McCain's bid for the Republican nomination eight years ago. The smear campaign included whispers that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock.

After denouncing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, McCain campaigned to make them permanent. He made up with evangelical leaders he had denounced as "agents of intolerance.'' Once a champion of immigration reform, he now focused on border security.

Banishing Reporters

Another change came when McCain's top tactician, Steve Schmidt, banished reporters from his campaign bus, ending those rambling conversations that McCain credited with sharpening his thinking.

To further minimize the chances of McCain committing gaffes, Schmidt persuaded him to stop speaking off-the-cuff. Even in casual, small gatherings, McCain was reduced to casting furtive glances at note cards for his talking points.

Ultimately, it was the economy that did McCain in, playing to his biggest weakness and Obama's greatest strength.

The implosion of the markets "just broke the back of the Republican Party,'' said Charlie Cook, publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

By Edwin Chen and Hans Nichols, Bloomberg, November 5, 2008

WASHINGTON - Audacity won. Now Barack Obama must validate the hope and deliver the change he promised.

He's already changed America by becoming the first black man to win the White House. His challenge is to change the course of its government and guide it through hard times and past the financial crisis he inherits as he takes office.

"The Audacity of Hope," the title of his book, could also have been the title of his campaign. It certainly was audacious for a fledgling senator from Illinois to run for president, challenging conventional Democratic wisdom and a field of rivals dominated by the supposedly unstoppable Sen. Hillary Clinton. He stopped her with an incredible campaign built from the ground up, raised more money than any presidential candidate in history - about $700 million over two years - and beat veteran Republican Sen. John McCain in an electoral college landslide.

Obama is the first Democrat in 32 years to win election with a popular vote majority, and Jimmy Carter barely got past 50 percent in 1976. Obama gained 52.3 percent to 46.5 percent with 94 percent of all U.S. precincts tallied. In electoral votes, at 5 a.m. in the East, it wasn't even close - 349 to 147.

At 47, after a scant four years as a senator, Obama overcame the inexperience argument and a barrage of McCain attack ads. Obama drew remarkable crowds as a campaigner, and 125,000 jammed into Chicago's Grant Park on election night, not only to rejoice in victory, he said, but to join in facing the rigors ahead.

"Even as we celebrate tonight, we know that the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest in our lifetime," Obama said. "Two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century."

While the campaigning Obama hewed to his hope and change theme start to finish, with detours to take the offensive amid the GOP attacks, McCain tried an assortment of messages before settling in the closing days on his own claim to be an agent of change, and his assertion that the Democrat was a tax-and-spend socialist.

It didn't work. "I don't know - I don't know what more we could have done to try to win this election," McCain said in Phoenix, after calling Obama with his congratulations. He did more, commending Obama for "inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans," saying he had achieved a great thing for himself and his country.

It was a grace note to end a contest short of such notes. He said the disappointment of defeat was natural, "but tomorrow, we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again."

And Obama, in triumph, warned against a return to "the partisanship and pettiness" he said has poisoned politics for too long. And he told Americans who voted against him that he hears their voices. "I need your help," he said. "And I will be your president, too."

Such fine vows are traditional when a new president is elected. Delivering on them after an often bitter campaign is the work ahead.

In exit polls, based on interviews with voters who had just cast their ballots, six in 10 said the economy was the most important issue facing the nation. And that was Obama territory. Eight people in 10 said they were worried about what will happen economically in the next year. And now that is Obama territory, too, because as president, he inherits the problem and the demand for solutions.

No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has faced economic and financial market crises so dire and so urgent as Obama confronts now. And Obama also must deal with wars in Iraq, which he has promised to end, and in Afghanistan, where he plans to send U.S. reinforcements. He may have headaches with his own Democrats on war issues. Liberal Democrats want immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and may balk at sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is a liberal and a change agent, but he also tends to be cautious and analytical. The Democrats who want headlong change may well be dissatisfied. For them, Obama's celebration speech included a note of caution. "The road ahead will be long," Obama said. "Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But America ... we will get there."

With election-reinforced majorities in both the House and the Senate, the Democrats are in full command of the government.

They will have an effective Senate majority of at least 56 seats, counting two independents who have sided with them.

Democrats were gaining at least 25 seats to widen their House command.

They have been hobbled by President Bush and his vetoes, threatened or exercised. And Democratic measures have been stalled or stopped in the Senate because it takes 60 votes to end debate and force action. That will remain an obstacle.

In the exit polls, about 80 percent of voters said they disapproved of the job Congress is doing. That was a rating about as bad as Bush got. He was the invisible incumbent during the campaign, but Obama made him an issue and the link hurt McCain, much as he tried to disown the connection.

Bush is the past. Obama is the future, and it begins now, in troubled times, for a president-elect with a costly agenda of promises that would be difficult to deliver in far better economic circumstances.

"This victory alone is not the change we seek," Obama said. "It is only the chance for us to make that change."

By WALTER R. MEARS, Associated Press, November 5, 2008

ATLANTA (Reuters) - In churches and bars, on the street and in their homes, African Americans celebrated Barack Obama's historic presidential election victory on Tuesday with tears, horn blasts and shouts of joy.

In New York, people of all races streamed down from Broadway from Columbia University to Obama's campaign office at 105th Street chanting "O-ba-ma."

Obama supporters drove through the streets of downtown Washington for hours, honking their horns and cheering. A crowd of several hundred people gathered outside the gates of the White House in the drizzle, beating a drum.

In Atlanta, at civil rights leader Martin Luther King's old church, Ebenezer Baptist, a deafening shout greeted the announcement of Obama's victory and rolled on for minutes.

"On the night before King was assassinated, he said: 'I have been to the mountain top, I have looked over and I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you,'" Pastor Raphael Warnock said.

"Tonight we have seized the promise of America."

And in Chicago's Grant Park, Rev. Jesse Jackson stood among a crowd of tens of thousands of Obama supporters with tears rolling down his cheeks.

Jackson, who twice sought the presidency himself, witnessed King's assassination in Memphis 40 years ago.

'CIVIL WAR ENDED'

For anyone with a sense of America's history of slavery and the 19th century Civil War that tore the country apart, Obama's win was a landmark.

Slavery and its successor, a brutal system of racial segregation that prevailed in the South until the 1960s, long tarnished the country's pride in democratic ideals.

"And so it came to pass that on November 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States." wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman.

It was not just columnists seeing a moment to savor.

"This is definitely history in the making," said elementary school teacher Sheneka Mayes, 32, in Atlanta. "This night will be burned into my memory and into the memory of my children."

In a politically polarized country, many conservatives bemoaned the defeat of Republican John McCain but supporters of Democrat Obama delighted in his win, and many of them because he will be the first black president in U.S. history.

A big crowd held a candlelight vigil at King's tomb in Atlanta, setting the election firmly in the context of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s to end racial segregation and win the right to vote for black Americans in the South.

"My grandfather was born a slave, so for me to see this happen means that there is hope for America, said Vanessa Ford, who works for Coca Cola.

'UNBELIEVABLE NIGHT'

Later, thousands packed Ebenezer Baptist, listening to speeches and thumping gospel music from a choir dressed in black, and watching two giant TV screens scrolling results.

For many, Obama's win was all the sweeter because it brushed away worries that weeks of opinion polls giving him a lead against McCain might have overestimated his support among the country's white majority.

"This is a great night. This is an unbelievable night," said U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who was brutally beaten by police in Selma, Alabama, during a voting rights march in 1965.

"Tonight we can celebrate and thank God almighty. Martin Luther King must be looking down from the heavens and saying 'hallelujah,'" Lewis said.

In New York, thousands of people were enthralled by a big screen set up on 125th street in Harlem, the unofficial capital of black America.

Cab drivers honked their horns, a city bus driver inched his bus through an impromptu block party and paused to high-five the throngs through his window.

In other East Coast cities including Boston and Miami, crowds of mostly younger revelers poured into the streets for impromptu celebrations.

In his home city of Chicago, Obama gave a victory speech to a crowd of more than 200,000. Many had waited hours to see him, sensing it would be a milestone in history.

For Dornise Pewitt, the election of a black man offered hope for her sons and daughter.

"Maybe people will be able to see them differently and look past the color of their skin," she said.

By Matthew Bigg Matthew Bigg, Reuters, November 5, 2008