Date published: 2008/11/05
The BBC says:
Democratic Senator Barack Obama has been elected the first black president of the United States, prompting celebrations across the country.
"It's been a long time coming, but tonight... change has come to America," the president-elect told a jubilant crowd at a victory rally in Chicago.
His rival John McCain accepted defeat, and called on his supporters to lend the next president their goodwill.
Obama should have said: "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over". But of course that's not his style. If McCain had run a campaign as gracious as he was in his speech last night, then the result might well have been different. But by choosing the eminently unqualified Sarah Palin as his VP candidate, by claiming that the jerk Joe the Plumber was some kind of role model, by running a completely negative campaign where his team claimed over and over that Obama was basically a Marxist terrorist, and by flip-flopping on the economic crisis almost every other day during the campaign, McCain forfeited any right to be president.
The result looks like a landslide but it is a bit misleading. Certainly the electoral college was a landslide. But the popular vote was only 52-46, which although a fairly big gap given recent presidential elections, is not that huge. And even more problematically, in some of the big states, e.g. Ohio and Virginia, which drove that big electoral college victory, Obama won by less than five percent. It would be quite easy for the Republicans to come back, dreadful as that might be. (And no matter how bad McCain was, the alternatives in the Republican Party were, and are, worse.)
Bush has left the country in a complete mess. Republicans always claim that government is no good, and Bush has gone above and beyond the call of duty to prove this. It's hard to believe that the Democrats can turn it around, but we'll have to see. Whatever, 20 January 2009 will indeed be seen as "the end of an error".
The BBC coverage of the campaign was woeful. It was far too full of the "he says, she says" coverage all too familiar in the American media, and so provided no real analysis. The only way to find out what was going on in the campaign was to read blogs, which is an indictment of the so-called mainstream media.
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