Pandemonium - Obama takes all 11/5

Oh man.



From the New York Times: "Dateline: GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens."

I think I worked 80 hours for the campaign since Thursday. But all week I've been playing 'Chocolate City' in my head and on my computer. When I decided to only look at Vegas book to see how the campaign was going, I began to understand that we had a lock on it. That was Monday, and I cried all day. Then yesterday it was giddy energetic fearful glee, the kind of thing my friend Snowden said that the Germans are sure to have a word for, all day. I worked all day at the 2nd Street phone bank (Morgan Freeman had given us run of his front office and wireless network--the campaign crowdsourced the infrastructure and centralized the data, which drove the strategy) with the same old crowd and while we were completely exasperated and exhausted, we just kept at it all day. At 3pm we'd made 20,000 calls to North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. At 5pm we were calling Colorado. At 6pm we were calling Alaska. Then they opened the liquor and lit up the four big screen TVs. There were probably 200 people there. Jim showed up with the kids. Terri and I set up my laptop on the table in front of the TV, and we loaded (and reloaded and reloaded) Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, CNN, fivethirtyeight, and Twitter. The fastest, bestest, most reliable information came across Twitter, with TPM a close second (plus they had a cool interactive map you could roll over). I was shouting out information as fast as it came across the wire and then the TV would confirm it in a few seconds. It was astounding.

So Ohio fell blue and then Pennsylvania went, and then Twitter and then TPM and then CNN called it for Obama, toro toro toro, and cut to the countdown clock for the polls closing on the west coast. We counted down the last 20 seconds like it was new year's eve and then the entire room exploded into pandemonium. And then Virginia tipped blue on the interactive map and I hollered that out, and then Fox called Florida blue, and I hollered THAT out and then we were all just crying and laughing and screaming and hugging. And Jim cried. And Jesse Jackson cried. And then John came on and said thanks for the race Barack and then Barack came on and told us all about that 106 year old lady in Atlanta.

Who Trixie and Elise were talking about in the car this morning. And they didn't understand, really, why it was so important that she was so old and voting. So we talked about how old she was when the women were finally able to vote, and how old she was when the blacks were finally able to vote, and how her grandma lived in a time when most black people in America were slaves. And how she's lived such a long time, and how the kind of change she has seen in her long long life is the kind of change Obama's talking about. Good change. Big change.

And then, tonight, talking with Joe about the race, he asked about the score, so we went back to the maps and got the score (349-144). And then he asked me about the White House, and I found this: http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/life/video/index.html. The video starts automatically. Bear with it until about 2:44, when it gets interesting. I think it's a single take.

I LOVE the internet. Didn't Al Gore invent that just before he invented global warming?

We are delirious with joy, I tell you. Thanks for keeping the faith in us for the last eight years.