Washington, Nov 4 (PTI) Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today won handsomely in the first election returns of the 2008 presidential race, winning 15 of 21 votes cast in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire.
People in the isolated village in New Hampshire's northeast corner voted just after midnight Tuesday.
It was the first time since 1968 that the village leaned Democratic in an election. The town, home to around 75 residents, has opened its polls shortly after midnight each election day since 1960, drawing national media attention for being the first place in the country to make its presidential preferences known.
We guarantee you: That margin will narrow today, with polls now open in half the states. The outcome, which candidate comes out with more popular votes today -- and most importantly, the electoral college majority of 270,-- will take a while to glean tonight.
The vote caps a historic presidential campaign more than two years in the running and the costliest ever. It will conclude with either the election of the first African-American in a nation once riven by slavery and long plagued by racial strife, or with the election of the first female vice president in a nation where women won the right to vote only 88 years ago. Either way, the outcome of the 2008 presidential election would inspire people long denied a place in the national political arena.
The result in Dixville Notch is hardly a reliable bellwether for the eventual winner of the White House -- or even the result statewide, the report said.
While New Hampshire is a perennial swing state -- with 4 Electoral College votes at stake -- Dixville Notch consistently leans Republican. The last Democrat it picked was Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in 1968.
It could end with the election of the oldest man ever to win a first term as president: John Sidney McCain III, 72, the senior senator from Arizona, who served a full career in the U.S. Navy - including five-and-a-half years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam - before beginning a congressional career that has spanned another quarter century. He is older than Ronald Reagan, then 69, was at his first election.
Or it could end with the selection of one of the youngest American presidents ever - only John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton were younger at election. Barack Hussein Obama II, 47, the junior senator from Illinois, has served less than four years in the Senate and served eight years as a state legislator before that.
But it is much more than age that divides Obama and McCain.
President Bush won the town in a landslide in the last two elections: He captured 73 per cent of the vote in 2004 (19 residents picked Bush while six preferred Sen. John Kerry), and secured 80 per cent of the vote in 2000 (21 votes for Bush, five votes for Al Gore.) But villagers expected the results to be close this year given Democrats now outnumber Republicans there.
The town picked both John McCain and Barack Obama for the New Hampshire Democratic and Republican primaries in January. McCain ultimately won the state of New Hampshire, while Hillary Clinton upset Obama there.
Obama, a Harvard-trained attorney, was born of a white mother from Kansas and black father from Kenya who left the family early on, leaving Obama to be raised largely by his mother and also by his grandmother in Hawaii - a beloved grandmother who passed away on the eve of Election Day.
He never served in the military, but rather served as a community organizer in Chicago and penned a best-selling memoir in his 30s, Dreams from My Father, that helped secure him and his own family financially.
McCain, a third-generation graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, is the son and grandson of four-star admirals who served in the great World Wars. Descended from a long line of Naval and Army commanders before that, he also is the descendant of a Confederate Army officer and slaveholder in Mississippi, William McCain.
He was raised at Naval stations around the world, and became a bomber pilot. He was shot down over Hanoi during his 23rd bombing raid against North Vietnam. His best-known memoir, Faith of My Fathers, was penned with the help of a Senate aide before his first, failing bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
Obama, launching a self-styled "audacious'' campaign for the presidency on a cold day in a town square of Springfield, Ill., in February 2007, would go on to raise more money than any presidential candidate in history - more than $600 million - and in the process overrun the candidacy of one of the biggest names in American politics: He defeated Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York for his party's nomination in June.
McCain, never the darling of his own Republican Party for his willingness to confront issues such as campaign financing limitations and immigration reform in cooperation with Democrats, managed to wrest the 2008 nomination from a crowded field of GOP candidates. He had fallen short of nomination in 2000.
He attempted to cast himself as the world-experienced candidate, and his campaign commercials derided Obama as "dangerously unprepared'' to lead. Yet with the naming of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate, the selection of the first-term governor and former mayor of tiny Wasilla for a position potentially "a heartbeat away'' from the presidency undercut his argument about experience.
McCain, dubbing himself as "the original maverick,'' attempted to pivot with a campaign promising change. Yet this was the clarion call that Obama had first made in Springfield and a theme that the Democrat pursued with unwavering consistency - "change that we can believe in.'' And, ironically, Obama tapped a running mate, longtime Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, with decades of experience in Washington.
Obama also campaigned with sweeping promises for an embattled America both at home and abroad: Promising to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of election, and promising to offer health care for millions of Americans lacking it. It would come with costs, Obama conceded - promising tax cuts for 95 percent of all Americans, but tax increases for the wealthiest few to pay for his plans.
And Obama made a concerted effort to saddle McCain with his own party's unpopular retiring president, George W. Bush, holding a 25 percent job approval rating in the latest Gallup Poll - a near all-time low for American presidents since World War II. (Harry Truman fell to 22, Richard Nixon to 24 before resignation.) Obama and his party portrayed McCain simply as "more of the same.''
McCain, asserting that "I am not George Bush,'' attempted to distance himself from his party's president and contend that Obama's tax increases would offer nothing but harm for a stumbling economy. He seized upon the late-campaign comments of a supporter in Ohio, "Joe the Plumber,'' to portray Obama's plans as "socialism.''
But Obama, who had built a deep fundraising base with an Internet campaign capitalizing on energetic support from younger voters, outspent McCain vastly in the most competitive states of the 2008 election. Obama mounted not only a pervasive television campaign, climaxing with a half-hour of prime-time TV in the final week of the contest, but also a field operation of voter registration, campaign canvassers and a get-out-the-vote operation unparalleled in Democratic presidential campaigns.
In the closing weeks of the campaign, Obama concentrated his pitch on states that traditionally had voted Republican, such as Virginia, and states that have served as a bellwether of presidential elections, such as Ohio. McCain attempted to overturn what appeared to be a considerable advantage for Obama in the electoral vote count by focusing his attention on states such as Pennsylvania.
0 comments:
Post a Comment