Election Night in DC
Well, last night--and, technically, this morning--was really something.
My friend Katie was visiting from Australia and was quite excited to be in Washington for The Big Day. We had planned to head up to Busboys and Poets to watch the early returns on their ten-foot projection screen, amongst hundreds of true believers, but when the time came Katie was worn out with touristing, I had a cold that was tending towards asthma, and it was rainy, so we stayed put in my apartment near the White House instead. We watched PBS and The Daily Show but didn't dare crack out the champagne until both the Times and the Post put Obama over the top--I didn't fully trust the network projections, but somehow the print media seemed more solid.
Not long after we started, though, we started hearing car horns outside. I wasn't that surprised, but Katie got excited and wanted to go out to see what was going on. So out we went, champagne in hand. We first encountered well-dressed people waiting for their cars at the door of the Hilton across the street, which we rightly decided was a McCain victory party breaking up--I think that McCain hadn't given his concession by that point, even. But we also encountered a noticeable stream of people walking south, towards Lafayette Square and the White House, as well as some honking cars. We followed the stream...and found about 500 people already gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. (It was maybe 11:30 by this time.) They were cheering and singing and smoking cigars and chanting and hooting and hollering and everything else you can imagine. They all seemed to be about half our age and I wondered if it was the team of Obama volunteers who decided to go to the White House in their excitement, but I was told it was totally unorganized, totally spontaneous, though that they were mostly students from George Washington University who had walked the short distance over.
Katie and I were there for at least an hour, I'd say, before I realized I really missed having my cell phone with its camera and video recorder, which I had left at home, so I went back to get it. I think Obama made his speech in the interim, because when I got back outside, the few honking cars had turned into a heavy stream...and it had started raining pretty seriously. I thought maybe the crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue would be dispersing by then, but it had actually grown into Lafayette Square. By then, word had apparently gotten out about what was going on and the international broadcast media was there in some force--we saw Al Jazeera and what sounded like a Russian TV reporter, and we and our illicit bottle of champagne were filmed by CBS, though I couldn't find the footage on their website. I'm having trouble uploading the video I took, but this gives you an idea of what it was like. (That link is to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news clip of Paul Hunter doing a stand-up from the scene. The CBC also posted a video on its You Tube channel, but the sound is crap. I'm embedding it here because the video is better, though. Take your pick.)
Click to viewBetween my getting my phone and spending more time watching the party, maybe another hour had passed when our friend Angela, a writer at the local Fox affiliate, called. Katie was staying with her and she had finally gotten off work and was heading out to pick Katie up, though we wondered if she'd even be able to get close to my apartment.
She did. In fact, she was able to park just around the corner, but when she called up she said she'd really like to stay outside for a while, so we eventually joined her. And were amazed--the throngs were even wilder. We just hung out on the median at the intersection of 16th and K--the busiest corner in central DC, where the main north/south street meets the main east/west street--for the longest time because there was so much literal dancing in the streets there. People were hanging out of cars, high-fiving everybody who passed by, and generally going happily berserk. By this time what had been mostly a young, white crowd was much more mixed...and I was able to get this video to upload, though using a cell phone without a flash doesn't produce the best results.
By now it was maybe 2:00 a.m. We went back to the White House (Katie's and my third trip of the evening). About half-way there, I stopped. Because I had just done the math. Exactly 40 years and seven months ago, to the hour, this is what Washington looked like after Martin Luther King was shot:
And last night, in the same neighborhood around U Street--maybe even the same corner--after Obama was officially elected:
Nobody anticipated anything like this--not the cops, not people who've lived here for numerous elections....nobody. The papers say there were about a thousand people at the White House, but from what I saw, people were constantly leaving and being replaced by newcomers so there was a steady turnover of people. If that "one thousand" at a given point is right, I'd say about ten thousand people were there at one point or another in the night. It was really something else. And when I went to bed at about 4:00, I could hear it still going on.