Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

At this time, Barack Obama is now at 338 Electoral College votes. John McCain stands at 158 votes.

This means that Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the USA.

Obama is at least 5 million votes ahead of McCain. This is legendary.

Did McCain take a dive?

Now get to work and don't let us down!

I don't think I've been this excited about an election since, well, since Labour won a landslide in 1997. I've already talked at length about how much I admire Obama. I'm delighted he's President-elect.

I'm not a gambling man, but I was ready to put money on Obama in the first week of January, before he beat Hillary Clinton. The odds were 3-1 at that point.

I wish I had now.

I was a little worried in the final couple of weeks, especially when Obama started to pull ahead. I'd heard about the problems with electronic voting and the series of dirty tricks the Republican Party is said to have played on the electorate.

I was also surprised to see McCain doing so well in the polls leading up to the election. The man appears to me to be quite clearly a careerist power-seeker, not interested in others and driven to sell his very soul for power. This Rolling Stone article is particularly interesting reading.

Next to Obama, McCain appeared inept. Next to Whoopi Goldberg, he was laughable, in public, he was a clown, and clearly just a mouthpiece for some other intelligence. After 8 years of a joke president, who brought war and a broken economy, why would the electorate want another one? Not only that, why would the electorate want someone a hearbeat away from the presidency as thick-headed and vacuous as Sarah Palin?

This was a mind-boggling campaign: Obama went from a standing start 2 years ago, to raising about $700m and organising thousands of volunteers at the grass roots to go knocking on doors for him. He out-spent, out-organised and out-argued his opponent. Arguably, he also had the moral high ground, with McCain and Palin's attacks stooping to embarrassing lows of negativity, fear-mongering, guilt-by-association, misrepresentation and meanness.

Especially mean, and woefully-timed, was yesterday's official complaint by the Republicans to the Federal Electoral Commission that Obama had misused funds to visit his dying grandmother. Obama's grandmother died that very day.

The Republicans played the man, not the ball, and my cynical side is astonished that enough of the herds of American voters out there were clever enough to see through it. Even so, I can't for the life of me understand why 51 million people ended up voting for the McCain/Palin ticket at the end of the campaign.

Called states early on 5th Nov. 2008

Obama appears to have won every swing state in play. It's an incredible and crushing victory.  

The election was McCain's to lose, and he lost it in a willfully ham-fisted way. McCain's advisors aren't stupid. So did they take a dive? If they did, was it because they don't want to have to clean up the mess they've left behind? Or is it really irrelevant who's in the White House, since the same old corporate interests will continue to exercise power through their influence with whomever is President.

Time will tell. I mentioned earlier that I was thrilled about a Blair landslide in 1997. I soon discovered just how disappointing that was. On election day in 1997, I was living in Berlin. Berliners came up to us and congratulated us on finally turning a page and looking forward to a better future, working with Europe and selecting a government to undo the damage of 18 years of Tory rule. Looking back, I realise how naive we all were.

"Yes we can" doesn't sound all too dissimilar from "Things can only get better".

But he's in, now. He's proven that he can pick a campaign up from nothing and go on to win. Now he's going to have to prove that he can pick up the USA from the floor and restore it to glory. The work starts now, and I can only hope this is one politician who turns out to be a statesman.