Partying Like It’s 1992

By Richard Martin, 11-05-08

	Caption: Okay, now we can celebrate

Ohio was the turning point. When Barack Obama won the crucial Midwest state last night it popped the release valve on eight years of pent-up outrage, frustration, and shame for millions of Democrats and independents across the U.S.

Up to that point the several hundred Obama supporters gathered at the Boulder Theater had reacted with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety as early returns were reported by MSNBC and CNN on the big screen. Virginia was teetering. McCain briefly led the overall popular vote. For a while it seemed that, once again, potential victory might turn into crashing disappointment. Then came Pennsylvania, another bellwether state, and then Ohio, dashing John McCain’s prospects and making it clear an African-American center-left Democrat was going to be America’s next president. And that, for the first time since 1992, liberalism had won an unalloyed victory in national politics.

The crowd erupted. “Our long national nightmare is over!” crowed a middle-aged Boulder writer hoisting a pint of brown ale.

The crowd reflected the Obama demographic that pushed the Democrat to a victory that would have seemed preposterous just 12 months ago: mostly under-30 with a sprinkling of older liberals. The scene had the exultant air of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and many theater-goers had the blinking, slightly dazed look of people who’ve spent a long time in darkness, now wandering into the sunlight. They’d waited many, many years for this moment, and now that it was here they weren’t exactly sure how to celebrate.

“We came here tonight because we wanted to see history being made,” said a gray-haired dowager demurely sipping white wine with her companion as the raucous crowd hopped and cheered around them. “I wasn’t sure I’d live to see this day.”

After Ohio came Florida (which wasn’t called till late, but showed a clear Obama lead for most of the evening), then Michigan and Minnesota, the New Mexico, and finally – only moments before Wolf Blitzer called the entire election for Obama – Colorado. Nervous excitement gave way to relief and joy. What many people thought they’d never see was happening before their eyes, and there were hugs, high-fives, and more than a few tears. In triumph liberals have never been quite sure how to act, and plenty of people just wandered the theater with goofy smiles on their faces. There was room, however for some gloating and some residual anger at the forces who’d brought American ideals to their knees.

“I thought John McCain was a decent man,” said one twenty-something with a straw cowboy hat covering her cascading blonde curls. “Then he picked Sarah Palin.”

McCain’s gracious concession speech, in which he seemed to return to the decent, honorable man he was before the final months of the campaign, got a smattering of appreciative applause. Obama’s victory speech, sober and eloquent and fully aware of the challenges ahead, brought more tears and periodic shouts of “Yes!” “This is our time,” the slender black man onstage in Chicago’s Grant Park said. The triumph of the moment was subsumed by the gravitas and steely eyed resolve of the man who’d made it happen. The celebration had been all too brief.