Correspondent's Notebook

The view from Obama’s America

7 November 2008

This week the world focused on the United States and the election of the next president, Barack Obama, a 47-year-old bi-racial African-American who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, speaks with passion about the value of a good education, and won popularity with a message of hope and change.

Radio Australia’s Joanna McCarthy is in the US for six months and here are her observations the day after Barack Obama was elected the next president of the United States.

I think the first indication I had this was really a day unlike any other, was when I went and tried to get a newspaper and every newspaper stand in the city was empty.

I went to the news agents – they told me I’d have to wait at least another hour for new editions to be delivered. I went to the Borders store in Dupont Circle and they had a sign up saying “Due to overwhelming demand all US newspapers have been sold out.” Certainly, everyone knew it was a historic day.

I think you possibly also had a lot of people who’ve called in sick today. This is a heavily Democratic town and last night they were all out celebrating. In fact, I was watching it at a bar in downtown Washington and following Obama’s speech, a thousand people flocked to the White House and you had this spontaneous gathering of young people, they were dancing in the street, they were crying and hugging, they were climbing on each other’s shoulders. They had their Obama signs and cardboard cut-outs in the air. They were chanting, “Yes, we can” and “Obama” and finally they all started pointing towards the White House and shouting “Time to get out, time to get out” – which was obviously directed towards President Bush.

There was an enormous crush of people but everyone was really well behaved and jubilant rather than aggressive. They certainly seemed to be releasing a lot of pent-up energy and tension, after a two-year political campaign that has really mobilised young people in a way that it doesn’t seem this country has seen since at least the Vietnam War.

The fact that Barack Obama was African-American was not a defining feature of his campaign and it wasn’t a defining feature of the way the media has covered it. Certainly it’s featured in the media discussion but this was an election that has been fought on the issues and has really revolved around the crises that confront the country.

Now it seems that America is actually allowing itself to bask in this moment, to realise that it is a momentous and historic occasion and this is a president who has been elected by all Americans, from all races, something that he acknowledged in his speech last night.

I have to say I was just speaking to an African-American lawyer who’s a prominent member of the legal community here in Washington and I asked her whether she thinks this will change race relations in America. And she said to me “People who I would have thought would not appreciate my humanity because of the colour of the skin, I now realise they’ve said ‘Well, I’m going to make someone who looks just like you my president’.” She says that really shakes up her understanding of the country as she knows it.

She also says that among her younger African-American colleagues who were so certain that Obama was going to get in, you know, before yesterday she thought they were living in a different world. She says she now realises she was the one living in a different world and she’s never been so glad to be wrong.

The challenge now for Obama is to really manage those expectations, especially at such a difficult time. It’s almost impossible for him to deliver on what people are expecting of him. It’s widely agreed he faces the biggest set of challenges a new administration has ever had to confront and he listed all of them.

You saw him dealing with this last week – he had his half hour infomercial and he was already trying to manage expectations. He said, “I will not be a perfect president, the problems we have will take a lot of time to correct,” and he really went back to that last night where he said these are problems we won’t solve in one year or one term. I think this is a highly strategic move on his part to try to tamper down the huge level of enthusiasm.

Of course, with an increased Democratic majority in both houses and an economic decline, it’s almost certainly going to get worse in the next year. It’s possible that come the mid-term elections in 2010 or Obama’s re-election in 2012, if they haven’t delivered on expectations, they could be punished at the polling booth.