« 2008 »
On the morning of Election Day, Nov. 4, 2008, voting was a family affair for presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), and his wife, Michelle, as they made their way to their polling place in Chicago with daughters Malia and Sasha. After he and Michelle cast their votes, Obama played basketball at an athletic center on Chicago’s west side. Basketball had become his voting-day ritual after he won the Iowa and South Carolina primaries on days when he’d played ball, and after he lost in New Hampshire and Nevada on days when he hadn’t.
Page 1 of the Nov. 5 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette told the outcome: “Obama triumphs.” After serving from 1997-2004 in the Illinois state Senate and almost four years in the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama had been elected the nation’s 44th president, becoming the first black man to hold the world’s most powerful job.
On behalf of his campaign and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Obama to concede the race at 10 p.m. Nov. 4, moments after The Associated Press and major news stations had declared Obama and Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) the country’s next president and vice president.
In subsequent days, the Democrat-Gazette reported that although Obama only carried nine of Arkansas’ 75 counties, nationwide he garnered 349 Electoral College votes to McCain’s 162, with 52.3% of the popular vote to McCain’s 46.3%. Obama was the first Democrat to receive more than 50% of the popular vote in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter won in 1976, and he was the first senator elected to the White House since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
As AP described it, in a race where “the economy mattered above all else, with millions facing foreclosures on their homes, joblessness rising and Americans tallying the losses in their retirement accounts after a stock market plunge,” Obama had campaigned on “twin themes of change and hope in uncertain times.” McCain, meanwhile, sought to “stress his maverick’s streak” and distance himself from his party’s incumbent President George W. Bush.
In the Nov. 6 edition, Democrat-Gazette reporter Jane Fullerton noted similarities between the campaigns of Obama and former President Bill Clinton. She wrote that the “marked similarities between Bill Clinton’s 1992 race and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign illustrate the cyclical nature of politics — as well as the parallel journeys the two men took to the White House.” She quoted Paul Begala, a political analyst who helped manage Clinton’s 1992 campaign, who noted that “Clinton was elected as the man from Hope in a time of recession. … Obama ran on the audacity of hope at an ever deeper time of recession. They are both optimists in a pessimistic time.”
Obama and Biden were re-elected for a second term in 2012 and served until 2017.
— Jeanne Dahl
You can download a PDF by clicking the image, or by clicking here.
