Barak Obama has been elected president beating Republican nominee John McCain. Great, maybe I was expecting what happened back in 2004 and 2000 with Florida. This time was just without disturbance and you could feel the emotions and hope of the people in Chicago thru the TV screen wishing for democrats back to the White House; awesome.
Obama is the first African-American to be nominated by a major American political party for president. As the 44th president, Obama will move into the Oval Office as leader of a country that is almost certainly in. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.
Obama’s challenge: fix economy, save world. “There will be no poor.”
It has been eight years since that fateful Election Night when United States stayed up as long as it could through the dark hours without a president, only to wake up to some of the darkest years in American history.
That’s why the sense of hope that swept Barack Obama into the White House now has been felt around the world, from the celebrations in Kenya to the parties in Europe, Asia, and around America herself.
No president, even with an overwhelming majority in Congress like Obama will have, can ever hope to solve all of this. But progress can be made on all fronts. Indeed, just turning in the right direction on some of them would be a huge success.
On the economy, Obama has a great challenge as voters expect results.
- Obama must solve a financial calamity that requires billions of dollars in spending that the U.S. doesn’t have.
- He must address a nation that feels overtaxed, yet is in desperate need of funds to save companies, jobs and homes.
- He must realign a broken financial regulatory system without adding a crippling new set of regulations.
- He must restore confidence in America’s economy in a world that just got sucker-punched by an exported credit crisis that is causing a global recession.
- He must pick a Treasury Secretary under the greatest global scrutiny a President has ever seen, not to mention cabinet posts for Defense, Environment, and even Trade that will take on strategic importance far beyond their historical legacies.
- Most importantly, he must enact as many of the vital social programs as he can while also cutting the national debt and budget deficit.
No doubt his speech was soaring and inspiring. But once he has made it to the White House, his actions will be measured far more than his words. This historic election will be a milestone in American politics. But Obama’s real place in history will measured by whether he actually has the chops to reform and rebuild an economy — the largest in the world — gone horribly and irrevocably awry.
