Celebrating the dream
Americans always will remember where we were at the watershed moment when Barack Obama, that skinny guy with the funny name and brown skin, forged a new chapter in U.S. history.
An improbable campaign that started with a dream in Springfield amid the shadows of Abraham Lincoln reached the political mountaintop Tuesday in an ebullient celebration on a glorious night in Grant Park framed by the skyline of Chicago. Voters, young and old, black, white and brown, male and female, had heard Obama's message of hope and put him in his place - the White House.
He repeated that message Tuesday.
"We have never been just a collection of red states and blue states. We are and always will be the United States of America," Obama told the cheering Grant Park throng.
"I'm going to cry," said Denise Brown, 45, who grew up in Glen Ellyn and now lives in Villa Park. Wearing a new Obama T-shirt festooned with buttons, her eyes teared up and her voice cracked as she and her sister, Loren Buford, 54, of Hyde Park, pondered the significance.
Never has change been so dramatic, so instant, so emotional. People hugged, cried, laughed and paraded down Michigan Avenue after it was over, chanting "O-ba-ma!" It was as if a national burden had been lifted.
"It's history. I'm a part of it," Brown said.
The sea of hundreds of thousands of supporters wrapped around the park in orderly lines and cheered each Obama electoral victory as state after state turned blue on the big-screen TVs.
"I just had to be here," said longtime Obama fan Cheryl Steele of Aurora, who came to the history-making celebration with her 15-year-old daughter, Hannah. "Never in my 46 years have I been this invested in an election - just driven to come out and be a part of history."
In as diverse a crowd as Chicago has ever seen, thousands of smiling people said hello to strangers or shared knowing nods to signal the transition from "Yes, we can" to "Yes, we did." Nearly everyone recorded video, shot photographs or captured moments on their cell phones. Vendors hawked "hope" T-shirts, "dream" shirts with Obama and Martin Luther King Jr., and myriad variations on the President Obama theme starting as cheap as $10.
"Look at the vastness of his support, how he's moved so many people," marveled Steele.
Alexandra Hoffman, 18, of Vernon Hills found her ticket on Craigslist.
"It was $100, but it's worth it," said Hoffman, a photography major at Columbia College. "It will be a part of history, and I want to be a part of it."
The race pitting the Democrat and his vice presidential nominee Joe Biden against Republican John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin energized a record voter turnout across the nation and enticed a worldwide audience. Thousands of journalists from around the globe sent the story of Obama's victory in a tapestry of languages.
In the park where hippies and Yippies clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic convention, peace reigned among the 70,000 Obama supporters who got tickets, and the tens of thousands more who came to the park as the winds of change transformed the Windy City. The past yielded to the future.