ELECTION NIGHT VICTORY PARTY - an incredible musical moment & more...

Election 2008 victory on 11-04-08 (written 11-05-08)

I'm still giddy about Barack winning. We had a great party at the Pasadena Hilton last night. It included an impromptu singing of what began as "We Shall Overcome," but it immediately became, "We have overcome, today..." A room jammed with thousands of people, all ages, all races and ethnicities, arm-in-arm, singing THAT. Wow.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t say anything about the emotion of that, what makes you think we were not tearful? Some were. Others were so filled with elation that their feet were not on the ground. I saw smiles on people's faces that surely were the biggest smiles of their lifetimes - and those face-stretching smiles were on more than faces of black people old enough to have experienced the Civil Rights movement, or the faces of other people of color of all ages. There were giddy old white men, giddy middle-aged women of every hue, giddy and hooting eighteen year olds who had just voted for the first time, and wide-eyed young kids who didn’t quite comprehend it, but knew from everyone around them that this was more momentous than anything that’s yet happened in their young lives.

The "Yes, We Can!" chant of the long campaign was now "Yes, We Did!" That began behind the Democratic headquarters while a few hundred of us were waiting for the shuttle buses to the Hilton. It began as soon as the wild cheer began to fade, upon learning via Blackberry or iphone that we had won Virginia.

I learned that Barack was at home in Chicago, having dinner with his wife and little girls. How utterly characteristic of our unflappable candidate. Calm and focused on his loved ones, even at that moment.

My cel phone rang. It was a friend who told me that both MSNBC – and surprise of surprises, Fox – had determined that Barack Obama had already compiled 200 electoral votes. And nothing was yet projected for the far West. I instantly sensed what I later learned that Keith Olbermann had just told the cable TV audience: that 200 electoral votes, plus the 55 from California that we knew were ours, plus 11 from Washington State we would surely get, plus the four from Barack’s home state of Hawaii, equaled 270.

Without hard-fought swing-state Nevada, or even Oregon, the magic number was as good as achieved; everything else was icing on the cake. Even if the networks hadn’t yet announced it, there it was! At that moment, I couldn’t contain myself. I told those around me about the simple and profound and impending addition of the three blue states. We all exhaled the tension, even as we broke into new smiles and embraces. We didn’t want to disturb the others around us, who were happy enough and still celebrating the moment with the news that Virginia, and then Ohio, were blue for Barack. I taught the bus “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and we sang and chanted “Yes, We Did!” on the short bus ride.

At the victory party, we were jammed together like sardines in the Hilton Ballroom, where we arrived in time to watch on a huge screen, as John McCain delivered his concession speech. Many of us applauded him at several of his key pauses, with no mocking laughter or derisive shouts from anywhere. That shared sense that civility was the natural thing to do continued a refreshing and revealing aspect that I know impacted others, as well. It reminded me that nowhere in the beehives of Obama events and headquarters and call centers had I seen any negative buttons, unlike any other campaign I had ever worked. The perfection of this uniquely positive campaign, and the positive energy of being part of it, was preserved all the way to the finish line.

Then Barack made his victory speech, channeling Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln and all the best orators that America has ever produced. The room was riveted, except for the emotions that flowed freely from so many, and contributed to, rather than detracted from, the experiences of all around them.

As candidate, now President-elect, Barack Obama finished his speech, the park in Chicago went wild, and the room’s sound system was drowned-out by a display of the same thing. If anyone had untied one of the many tethered red-white-and-blue helium balloons, its zipping flight across the ballroom would have been indistinguishable from the people who were bouncing between the ceiling and the floor. A group of high school kids behind me began the vertical jumping up and down that kids do, not together, but like corn kernels popping in a hot pan, and they hooted and cheered and finally grounded themselves in an enormous group hug that toppled over in a pile of arms and legs and laughter.

There were so many scenes that are mental photographs from the victory party. It was fascinating to see so many people who were really exhausted from all the precinct walking and door hangers and poll checking and phone banks to swing states, and there we were, all together in the astonishing shared moment of history that we had helped create, clinking glasses and beer bottles and slapping high-fives, some pumping huge and enthusiastic handshakes, others enjoying warm hand clasps as we looked into each other’s telling faces, and ultimately, as we all succumbed to dancing wildly.

So many images will endure. There was the huge choir from the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, and they do much more than sing: theirs is performance art. Then there was the deejay spinning music that could have been played the night of Jimmy Carter's victory in 1976 - "We Are Fam-i-ly" was clearly a favorite - and all the people of all ages who pushed tables back to make space to resurrect disco line dancing, five rows deep. Someone started a conga line, and it snaked and gyrated a half dozen times through every part of the big ballroom before I joined it. Eventually it snaked across the wide stage. There, the segment that included me with many others suddenly stopped its forward motion, and ours was the part that was still up on the stage we had been crossing. The eyes and smiles of the room were looking to us to entertain, or simply to express with and for them from on high, the shared elation. So we danced, and danced, and some of us busted moves we couldn't have, under any other circumstances.

Throughout the ballroom, a great many of us embraced strangers because we were THERE, there together, unified as one people in the moment of victory. Today, I thought of that and remembered the iconic Life magazine cover photo, of the moment frozen in time as the news spread that WWII was over – the famous photo in Times Square of the sailor kissing the girl he didn't know, sweeping her off her feet, and she embracing him and enjoying it because there just wasn't anything else for either of them to do.

I had copied and brought a stack of lyrics of the song, "Happy Days Are Here Again," FDR's victory song from his election in 1932. I had many more than those distributed on the bus ride over. I had included on the lyric sheets that the song had also been sung the night of JFK's victory in 1960, and of Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. Someone said he would get a copy to the keyboard player. Instead, he reported later that he took it to the deejay, who had never heard of the song. So, unfortunately, it wasn't sung. But I do know that many left with their copy, so at least some have surely gone online and found Barbra Streisand singing her moving, if too slow version.

I'm thinking of going to DC for Barack's Inauguration on January 20. I was there as a journalist when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were inaugurated in 1993. It's an amazing thing to go. You freeze your butt off in the January cold of DC, and you don't care, because you're there to be part of the great symbolic moment, the moment when all things are possible for our shared future. It’s one of those moments when the late Tim Russert would have said, “What a country!”

Or maybe sharing the election victory with that room full of campaign volunteers and Obama-Biden supporters was enough, before the real work begins. It was restorative. I again feel a sense of covenant with my country, and that is something I had not felt for a long time.

I really believe that we, the people, grabbed a hold of an America that has been in a state akin to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and we now have the hope and the makings of a new cultural Renaissance. The endless campaign, so suddenly over, has brought a far grander, far more profound, sense of success and meaning and hope, light years beyond anything that I, for one, could have predicted or imagined I would feel from taking part in it.

My God, it was only 45 years ago that Martin Luther King was getting his head bashed-in on a bridge in Birmingham, and black members of bands and football teams could not stay in the same hotels with their white counterparts, and gas stations in the South had four restrooms, one each for White Men, White Women, Colored Men, and Colored Women (or maybe just three restrooms, two for whites, and a unisex one simply labeled, "Colored," and seldom, if ever, maintained, so that its decrepit condition could support horrible racial stereotypes.)

But I know you "get it." You wouldn’t have taken the time to read this if you didn’t already know. And if you imagined what it was like to be there with us on election night, singing, "We have overcome, today..." then you were there, too, even if I didn't see you, and even if you didn't know it until now.

Despite the flaws of a system that retains an archaic Electoral College, we have had our faith restored that every vote matters. Every one matters. Together, we have taken our country back, and together, we have done it for all of us.

Best,
Larry
Larry Wines, programmer-producer-host, "Tied to the Tracks" acoustic Americana radio and television, syndicated from Los Angeles, with live in-studio performance-interviews, included in "The Best of L.A. 2006" radio lineup by Los Angeles Magazine; editor, "Acoustic Americana Music Guide & News" at http://acousticamericana.blogspot.com and additional “TttT” news at www.myspace.com/laacoustic; consultant to artists, musicians, songwriters, festivals, and the music biz; feature writer for FolkWorks (www.folkworks.org).
.
PS - No trees were killed in the sending of this message, but a substantial number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
.
====================================