Americas Quarterly - Winter 2009

that many believed impossible only a year ago, and that many now hope will open up a new chapter of racial tolerance and integration, is an event that makes objectivity difficult. The sense of being eyewitness to history swept me and many of my colleagues up in the enthusiasm and evoked comparisons with similarly iconic moments. Talking to my mother in Chile the day after the election, I wondered aloud if this paralleled the celebrations that followed the “No” vote in 1989 that ended the rule of Augusto Pinochet.

My colleagues drew similar historical comparisons with their own national experiences. But they were also taken aback by some of the campaign’s rhetoric. A Russian journalist covering John McCain’s failed presidential run was amused by that campaign’s attempt to gain traction by insinuating that Obama’s economic platform was akin to socialism or even communism. “ Would they [U.S. voters] even know what a communist is?” he wondered.

AP/LUIS BENAVIDES

Election Day, November 4, was, frankly, exhausting. I bounced from one polling place to another in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. But despite my hectic travel schedule, I felt genuinely privileged to witness millions of Americans going to the polls. Voters lined the sidewalks outside each polling place, waiting patiently to cast their ballots. There was at each polling place a palpable

sense of expectation and purpose.

Many waiting voters were excited to tell their stories, which often conveyed their sense of the historical importance of the moment—and even their (yes, I will use the word) hope in the future. An October CBS/New York Times poll showed 89 percent of the population believed the country was on the wrong track. Regardless of who won, the elec-

rather than another round of bailouts, was new leadership that could restore investor, consumer and business confidence.

By 11:00 on election night, the major news networks had called the victory for Obama, even before the results were in from western states. Crucial swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida had gone over to the Obama camp, in some cases with impres-

Lottery tickets featuring a photograph of Barack Obama,
in Medellín, Colombia.

tion offered an opportunity to chart a new course. With the financial system failing to respond to each new and increasingly desperate measure by President George Bush’s administration to shore up the markets, it seemed that what the economy and Wall Street really required,

sive margins. Even in Florida—which had voted Republican since President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992—Obama won with a 3 percent margin and defied conventional wisdom that Cuban Americans would vote as a Republican bloc. According to Election Day exit polls in Miami-Dade

County, the heartland of Cuban America, conducted by Sergio Bendixen pollsters, Obama won over 55 percent of the vote of Cuban Americans under the age of 29.

Nationally, Hispanics voted en masse for Obama. Post-election analyses indicate that Obama received over 67 percent of the Hispanic vote, despite predictions that Hispanics, after overwhelmingly supporting Hillary Clinton during the primaries, would be wooed by Sen. McCain’s previously strong stand on immigration reform. If anything, what the results proved was that immigrants and Hispanic voters, as many observers have argued, vote more on bread-and-butter economic and social issues ( employment, health insurance, education) than on matters of immigration reform or hemispheric policy.

DISPATCHES

The morning after the heady speeches and the street celebrations, nobody could deny that the country had reached a milestone. Even McCain supporters recognized the historical significance of the election. McCain himself provided one of the more moving speeches of the night when he called for greater national unity in his concession speech. And since then, as the country’s economic problems have worsened, polls show a majority of Americans have high hopes for Obama’s presidency, regardless of how they voted.