BARACK OBAMA ELECTED 44TH US PRESIDENT!

Even though the polls and pundits suggested Barack Obama would win, I never really believed mainly because I was afraid to believe. I kept wondering what tricks the Republicans would have.I still remembered Gore's loss in 2000. Put simply the presidency had been stolen from Gore; the Republicans had caused many votes to be disregarded. The Republicans had even used the Supreme Court to their favor (a Supreme Court stacked with Republican-appointees).

These past eight years I've been feeling the United States is actually run by some kind of politburo, a bunch of people controlling the country with a front man. With Bush in power for eight years, everything seemed to be unraveling - the wars, military torture in Guantanamo, the housing bubble, the economic meltdown. I watched the dollar sink in value against foreign monies; I watched foreigners treat America with less and less respect. Sometimes, when foreigners talked about America's policies in a negative way, all I could say was, "I didn't vote for Bush."

In 2004, I too got caught up with the 9/11 matter, and didn't fully mourn Kerry's loss of the presidency. I understood that Bush was a wartime president and wartime presidents usually stay in power. There was talk that there was cheating during that election as well; but I suspect there are always complaints of cheating in any election. The feeling then was FEAR of Bin Laden and the Al Queda, so much so that our brains were muddled and we failed to question why America attacked Iraq as a reaction to Bin Laden.

That's one thing I learned about Bush - he likes to pressure the American people to get what he wants. Take the 700 billion dollar bailout that he proposed in September. Many people say the bailout was necessary; but the way I look at it, the economy had/has to run its course. The quick fix, Bush promised didn't happen. And meantime the housing bubble had burst, and people were losing their jobs and their pensions.

With all of this as backdrop the presidential campaign took place - like an epic play with characters strutting across the stage - the drama was something else! It was painful to see Hillary Clinton lose; it was insulting to see Sarah Palin introduced into the stage as "Hillary's replacement." It was mind boggling to see John McCain (the angry old man) stop his campaign to run off to Washington to "solve" the financial meltdown, which he didn't solve. It was nerve wracking to watch the presidential and vice-presidential debates. It was amusing to watch the Palin interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, and to watch Tina Fey in Saturday Night Live as Palin - and in some cases Fey just repeated Palin's inane words verbatim. And it boggled my mind to think Americans really liked Palin. I doubted the wisdom of all Americans. I thought about the political candidates I had supported and who lost (my mind, I had decided, is differently wired from the average American.) I worried that my rooting for Obama would jinx him. I had made the transition from Hillary to Obama, thanks in large part to my reading Obama's fine book, Dreams From My Father, which gave me a glimmer of the intelligence and goodness of this man.

Every day I found myself googling "political news, political polls" and spending hours reading about every political twist and turn. I was even watching YouTube political clips; I must have watched the Palin-Couric interview 6 times! (I wasn't alone; some other friends were just as obsessed as I was.) I watched when the McCain campaign brought up Obama's supposed association with Ayres; I watched how, within the day, the Obama campaign posted YouTube clips of McCain's involvement in the Keating scandal. I watched when the McCain campaign brought up the video reportedly showing Obama in the dinner for Palestinian Rashid Khalidi; and I watched how the Obama campaign quickly released information that McCain had headed a group that donated some 800 million dollars to Khalidi's group. It was remarkable how prepared Obama's campaign was to handle every dirt that the McCain campaign brought up. McCain's campaign members were the same people in Bush's campaign - Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt, Mike McDonald, Mike DuHaime and many more which I've listed in a blog entry "Who Are the People Running the McCain Campaign?" To me, they are part of the politburo that has been running the US for 8 years.

It was all a roller coaster ride.

And to my shock and delight, yesterday the American people spoke. In an orderly way a revolution occurred. Guns were not fired in this revolution, but in a loud way, people made it known that they want Obama to be their 44th president. Voter turnout was exceptionally large with voters waiting for hours. My husband and I waited 40 minutes, and I made sure the markings on my ballot were really there; I even held up my ballot and scrutinized it to make sure there were no smears, no strange markings. I didn't want any "hanging chad" to invalidate my vote. And the people roared; Obama did not win by a slim margin but by a landslide -349 electoral votes for Obama vs. 174 for McCain, with a couple more States to go. No need to quarrel over the results; no need to turn the matter over to a biased Supreme Court.

On TV last night I saw someone hold up a placard that said, "Bush You're Fired." And I saw a young African American woman, a student I surmised, on her knees, doubled-over, weeping for a long time. Many people wept; and while I grew teary, I had already wept the night before when I finally digested the notion that this man with the strange name, this son of a Kenyan student, had a good shot at being president of the United States.

The American people have spoken. The eight dark years of war and torture and fattening-up of Bush's cronies will be over. A new beginning is here for all Americans, and dare I say, for the rest of the world.