Obama elected 44th president

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27531033/?GT1=43001

Illinois senator to become first African-American executive in U.S. history
BREAKING NEWS
By Alex Johnson

Barack Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, shattered more than 200 years of history Tuesday night by winning election as the first African-American president of the United States, according to projections by NBC News.

Obama reached the 270 electoral votes he needed for election at 11 p.m. ET, when NBC News projected that he would win California, Washington and Oregon.

Obama’s opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, called Obama to offer his congratulations at 11 p.m. ET, Obama’s chief spokesman, Robert Gibbs, told NBC News. Obama thanked McCain for his “class and honor” during the campaign and said he was eager to sit down and talk about how the two of them could work together.

Saying, “The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly,” McCain told supporters in Phoenix that he “recognized the special significance” Obama’s victory had for African-Americans.

“We both recognize that though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still have the power to wound,” McCain said.

“Let there be no reason for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth,” said McCain, who pledged his support and help for the new president.

President Bush called to congratulate Obama and promise a smooth transition of power on Jan. 20, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Tens of thousands await Obama
A crowd nearing 100,000 people gathered in Grant Park in Chicago, awaiting an address by Obama. Hundreds of thousands more — Mayor Richard Daley said he would not be surprised if a million Chicagoans jammed the streets — were watching on a large television screen outside the park.

Campaigning as a technocratic agent of change in Washington pathbreaking civil rights figure, Obama swept to victory over McCain , whose running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was seeking to become the nation’s first female vice president.

Obama’s election was a broad one. He won Florida, the scene of so much electoral chaos in recent elections. He won Ohio, a key to President Bush’s two election wins. He won Colorado, home of the religious right. And he won Virginia, reversing 40 years of Republican victories there.

Surveys of voters as they left polling places nationwide encapsulated the historic nature of the victory by Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. As expected, he won overwhelmingly among African-American voters, but he also won a slim majority of white voters. He won among women and Latino voters, reversing a longstanding Republican trend. And he won by more than 2-to-1 among voters of all races 30 years old and younger.

That dynamic was telling in Ohio and in Pennsylvania, where McCain poured in millions of dollars of scarce resources. Obama won both, along with Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and New York, all states with hefty electoral vote hauls, NBC News projected.

McCain countered with Texas and numerous smaller states, primarily in the South and the Great Plains.

In interviews with NBC News, aides to McCain said they were proud that they had put up a good fight in “historically difficult times.”

A senior adviser said McCain himself was “fine” but that he felt “he let his staff and supporters down.”

Obama will have a strongly Democratic Congress on the other end of Capitol Hill. The Democrats won strong majorities in both the House and the Senate. NBC News projected that the party would fall just short of a procedurally important 60 percent “supermajority” in the Senate, however.

Record turnout delays key results
In the end, Florida, the scene of electoral chaos in recent elections, had little impact. Florida had been closely watched, but results there and in other closely contested states were delayed until after Obama clinched his victory as record numbers of voters flocked to polling stations, energized by an election in which they would select either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice president.

Obama, who led in nearly all public opinion polls, and McCain both launched get-out-the-vote efforts that led to long lines at polling stations in a contest that Democrats were also hoping would help them expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Americans voted in numbers unprecedented since women were given the franchise in 1920. Secretaries of state predicted turnouts approaching 90 percent in Virginia and Colorado and 80 percent or more in big states like Ohio, California, Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Maryland.


Voters were lured to the polls by the historic nature of an election that held the potential to yield an African-American president.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a living legend of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, said he was “overwhelmed” and had broken down in tears.


“I never imagined, I never even had any idea I would libe to see an African-American president of the United States,” Lewis said in an interview on MSNBC.

“We have witnessed tonight in America a revolution of values, a revolution of ideals,” Lewis said. “There’s been a transformation of America, and it will have unbelievable influence on the world.”

Obama, however, played down the historic nature of his candidacy, preferring to emphasize what he offered as his plans to bring sweeping change to Washington and close the door on the two-term presidency of George W. Bush, whose approval ratings are near historic lows.

Election experts predicted that as many as 140 million Americans would vote, many of them minority, immigrant and young Americans who were casting ballots for the first time.

Maria Reyes, who immigrated from El Salvador and was sworn in as a citizen in August, was one of them. She cast her ballot with help from her daughter, Elvia.

“It’s wonderful time for our country right now — Obama!” Reyes said as she waved a small American flag.

In the Little Saigon section of Los Angeles, Timothy Ngo, a Vietnamese immigrant, turned out to support McCain.

“I came here as a refugee, so Mr. McCain and I grew up and fought in the same war in Vietnam,” Ngo said.


Obama, McCain cast their ballots
Obama and his wife, Michelle, voted with their young daughters at their sides at Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School in Hyde Park, Ill. The family was ushered inside ahead of a line of their neighbors that wrapped around the block.

Fellow voters watched in silence and snapped cell-phone pictures. They cheered when Obama held up his validation slip with a smile and said, “I voted.”

“The journey ends, but voting with my daughters, that was a big deal,” he told reporters later.

Obama’s final days of campaigning were bittersweet: He was mourning the loss of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him but died of cancer Sunday night and never got to see the results of the historic election.

In Delaware, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, went to the polls with his elderly mother. Speaking to reporters on his plane, Biden said he had made a deal with his wife, Jill.

“If you get the vice presidency and get elected, you can get a dog,” Biden said his wife told him. “I know what kind I want, [but] I don’t know what kind I’m going to get yet. We’re not there yet. The deal’s not closed yet.”


McCain, meanwhile, cast his ballot early Tuesday at a church near his home in central Phoenix. A small crowd cheered “Go, John, go!” and “We love you!” as he stepped out of a sport utility vehicle with his wife, Cindy. One person carried a sign that read, “Use your brain, vote McCain!”

Palin returned to where her political career began to cast her vote in the snow-dusted, two-story Wasilla City Hall where she once presided as a small-town mayor.

Palin, accompanied by her husband, Todd, voted just after 7 a.m. Tuesday, pushing aside a red, white and blue curtain on a voting booth and handing her white paper ballot to a clerk.

With Tom Curry of msnbc.com and Steve Handelsman and George Lewis of NBC News. The following NBC stations contributed to this report: KPNX of Phoenix; WAFF of Huntsville, Ala.; WLWT of Cincinnati; and WTMJ of Milwaukee.

© 2008 MSNBC.com