Obama Rally

I was there! I was there at Grant Park in Chicago, when Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. It was only after my arrival to the US that I learned about the rally on the election night, so there was no way for me to obtain a ticket for the official event. However, there were big screens installed in the accessible area of the park, showing the latest polls on CNN. I arrived rather late, but just in time to witness the announcement that Virginia, a hardboiled GOP supporter for the past 40 years, was taken by Obama. And it took maybe only some 15 minutes more to declare Obama the president-elect. (If I could only reach that level of punctuality more often ...) Of course people were very excited! Next, John McCain publicly conceded the victory to Barack Obama. At the beginning of his speech, he got a lot of "boo"s from the crowd around me, but he did manage to convince the majority that he is fair and can show greatness in the moment of his defeat. In fact, he got applauded at to a fair extent at the end of his speech. German (online) newspapers would later state that he showed "dignity", which I agree on. - Nevertheless, being a true European, I preferred of course Obama to win. Which he did. And that permitted him to deliver an even better speech. The keywords "responsability" and "maturity" were particularly appealing to me. Today I read a description of Obama as "brain-driven" (as opposed to "gut-driven", maybe?). I assume that is why I am so impressed by him: he is not visibly fazed by the Herculeic task ahead of him, and one has to have very sober mindset to be this cool. Given the incumbent is just the opposite, change really has happened last night in the US. As if this was not historical enough, Obama is of course, "by the way", also going to be the first African American president.