The White House on Election Night

By TOMÁS DINGES, Correspondent

All Tuesday Nov. 4, the television shots of the U.S. capitol were poor. Mist and drizzle obscured the ideal backdrop for what was seen by many as a defining presidential election in American history.

But at a little past 11 p.m. EST it didn’t matter what the city looked like. Barack Obama had been declared the president-elect of the United States. The streets of Georgetown began to flow with ecstatic young supporters. The neighborhood once derided by John McCain as the too frequent host of elite cocktail parties was now a conduit for a different sort of energy. Trailed by honking taxicabs, some weighted with passengers whose limbs flailed out the windows, and their predominately immigrant and black drivers, young people from Georgetown University, dressed in sweatpants and tight jeans, flip-flops and stilettos, marched on M St. chanting, “Yes we did, yes we did!”

Revolution was in the streets. These kids, many just 18 years old, may have thought that they were the ones who created it. Between 10 and 14 years old when George W. Bush was first elected, and gradually alienated by his reaction to 9/11 and his handling of the Iraq War, many had been passionately and personally involved with the election.

Inside a television studio on M Street, a twenty-four-year-old hockey player turned teleprompter operator checked CNN’s electoral map as he guided the moderator for ARD, Germany’s most-watched news network, through his almost 100 segments of election night coverage. Virginia’s numbers were against Obama and he was angry. “I worked so hard there,” he said. His updated vote counts varied by hundreds of votes. The channel’s political commentators began to ask him for input.

Outside, kids continued to flow by, jubilant. Tall, short, athletic, overweight, statuesque, humble, they walked, and then they ran. Some had no idea where they were going. They were just following the crowd. Others knew. M Street spills into Pennsylvania Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue leads to the White House.

Along the way, 51st State Tavern blared MSNBC as a clean-shaven young man wearing a navy blue suit walked out.

A Frenchman from Paris walked in. He asked if you had to specify what beer you wanted and whether you tip the bartender. He had arrived the Friday before to work in TV production. He got two lagers and repeated how lucky his timing was. He was 200 pages into Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father.”

The U.S., he said, is capable of electing a black man precisely because of our history of immigration and racism. France isn’t ready yet. The immigration in France is just beginning, he said, and most French have not spent any time with a Muslim or an Arab.

“We are the first generation that grew up with Arabs,” said the thirty-year-old. “I think that change will come. Maybe not soon, but it will come,” he said as he slowly drank his beer.

In front of the International Monetary Fund, the subject of furious protests by disenfranchised young people in 2000, a private security guard gave high-fives to passersby.

Waves of students seemed to roll back through the groups going to the White House, hugging, high-fiving and chanting.

A stern-faced cop and his companion in front of the old executive building were the first indication of a limited police presence.

The crowd began to come together and we dove into the teeming masses on the glistening street in front of the glowing White House. Thousands of people had accumulated, many young. Later, the crowd became more diverse in age and race.

“Grace Kohn said you can suck my dick Bush,” said Kohn, a student. Outgoing President George W. Bush had celebrated his wife’s birthday with coconut cake and a gift of earrings that night inside the White House.

Alex Rice, an 18-year-old from George Washington University took a different tack. “I love Obama and support this country,” he said. His disillusionment with Bush came when he was 13, he said, when the United States went to war with Iraq. “Finally we have a president that represents us.” There were chants of “U-S-A.”

The Frenchman saw his first American flag draped across the bare back of a bicycle rider. It was one of a few there. He was surprised. The French flag was a common site during group events, but, after years of representing national pride, it became a symbol of racist nationalism with the campaign by Jean Marie LePen. It became a regular symbol of hyper-nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment when waved at football games. But leading up to the election of Sarkozy, that nationalism began to change to suit the times. The people reclaimed it, ironically by the political posturing of Sarkozy.

It was the political posturing of the Republican party that in the end drove Dana Mozie, “the first hip-hop producer for a sitting president,” to the Obama party that night at The Park on Fourteenth, and then, alone, to the White House.

A hip-hop producer in the early 90s for the group Salt-n-Pepa, he helped bring hip-hop to mainstream America. Starting in 2000, he worked inside the White House under Bush on so-called outreach efforts to the black community. He emerged from those experiences, as did other “guys like me who were surrogates,” disillusioned.

“Republicans never would go to the ghetto,” he said, and as a result would never get the black vote. With Obama campaigning in poor black neighborhoods he noted something special in this candidate.

Still it was difficult for this black candidate to get elected. “One drop of black blood and it costs $670 million,” said Mozie, referring to the cost of the Obama campaign.

But now, the Obama candidacy allows for the “race card” to be thrown out, and “allows for a real sense of inclusiveness,” in America, he said.

The rain had stopped for a while now and Mozie, a dapper man around forty, put his umbrella down and looked wide-eyed at the people who continued to flow past.

“I thought it was a moment for black people, but it tapped something in other people too,” he said.

Mozie had been to the 54th and the 55th inaugurations, but, he said emphatically, “this is the original inaugural parade.”

People continued to squeeze through the tightening crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue. “America is back,” someone said. The fancier election night parties began to spill forth their participants near 1 a.m. Many paused in astonishment before entering the raucous crowd.

“Obama didn’t just change the party,” said Mozie, “he changed the paradigm.”

Tomás Dinges can be reached at tdinges@gmail.com.

Debate, PARTY!

By TOMÁS DINGES, Correspondent

A line of impeccably dressed partiers waited on the red carpet to get in to Bobby Van’s restaurant on the corner of 11th and New York Avenue in Washington, D.C. The bars were open on both floors and near the fountain in the courtyard. Vested waiters in tan uniforms wiped their harried faces of sweat and hustled, pressing their way through the tightly-packed, hot crowd. There were maybe 100 people on the dance floor and 500 elsewhere. It was around one a.m. Apparently the R.I.A.A. party was even better.

Many people were young, some had southern accents, some were from south Jersey. The women were elegant and striking. Most wore black. Some wore pearls. One wore a deep- red blouse and her name was Ashley. I saw Marilyn Monroe. She was leaving. Men towered routinely over six-foot-one. They wore fitted suits, pressed shirts. Some ties remained tight. There wore argyle sweaters. There seemed to be more fraternity lapel pins than Obama Hope ones.

A high-school friend, a 30-year-old commercial real estate lawyer specializing in loss mitigation, introduced me to her friends and acquaintances that she seemed to encounter every other five minutes. She pulled business cards out of a gold container and talked to other lawyers. It was a networking event. Sometimes, she would cut off conversation and eye passing men, who stopped quickly to talk. It was a meat-marketing event. At other times, she tugged at a pin on her shirt strap and showed them the JFK likeness silhouetted behind the face of Obama.

It was a political party put on by The California Project, one of a few parties for the thousands of attendees of the 38th Annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus this weekend. The CBC is a group of 43 U.S. legislators who work as a group to promote policy and leadership in Capitol Hill on issues pertinent to African Americans, and D.C. is a site for the black establishment.

Hours earlier, in Mississippi, the first campaign debate of this presidential election had finished in a draw, according to people I spoke with, at this party and others.

At the Republic Garden on U Street, a Washington institution, cuff links were flashed amidst the 400 or so people who had accumulated to watch the debate. One particularly well-informed viewer cried out every time there was a purported misstatement of Obama’s record. The crowd’s volume rose as Obama delivered a series of one-liners questioning the wisdom of assertions by McCain that ended in, “You were wrong.” A woman excitedly pummeled the air from her position on the couch.

At dinner afterwards, an author and a fellow at The Nation Institute, Amy Alexander, called it a draw. She wondered where Obama’s bite was. He always gets framed by McCain and is unable to fight back sharply, she said. But, then, she thought, if he did, he would be characterized as an angry black man “with grievances.”

Then we talked about Florida (where she lived for years), the www.thegreatschlep.com and all of the elderly Jewish Floridians who should, but won’t vote for Obama. “I want fresh, not fresh frozen,” intoned the author imitating the Jewish grandmother subculture, which she became familiar with while reporting in Broward County. The presumption that the Jewish vote would not vote for a black man for President is a “fucking hangover from Farrakhan,” and his view that Jews have been part of the oppressor class in America, despite their contributions to arts and science, according to him and even Farrakhan’s declared genealogical tree.

But other states were of greater concern to Alexander. Michigan, Idaho, Indiana. Militias, cults and the Klan. There are many white people out there, she said, that would be threatened by a black president.

“I don’t think it’s imprudent to worry, or wonder if someone out there is plotting to take him out. Just based on our history, it is not unrealistic,” she said. Assassinations of political figures in her lifetime are numerous. “Wallace, King, two Kennedy’s, Harvey Milk, George Moscony and an attempt on Ronald Reagan.”

“I don’t think you have to be a conspiracy theorist, either,” Alexander added.

Tomás Dinges can be reached at tdinges@gmail.com.