Tuesday 4th November 2008

Nobody likes a braggart but I got the popular vote margin — 52%/46% — dead on, and was out on the electoral college — 364/163 — by just one state (Indiana). In case anyone is wondering the music playing during Obama's victory rally was 'Titan's Spirit', by Trevor Rabin, from the Denzel Washington movie Remember The Titans. Which just goes to show that sometimes — just sometimes, under certain rare conditions — real life can turn out better than a Denzel Washington movie.

It was the crowd that commanded your attention as if it did at Invesco field, where the cheers and applause rippled around the stadium in great rolling waves. There were even more people at Grant Park, some 240,000, but it felt smaller, somehow: hushed, expectant, intent, as if taking their cue from the grave, sober man who walked out to meet them. They cheered and then quickly fell silent; and at the end, when he loosed his old "Yes We Can" call-and-response, it didn't turn into a chant, as it had in Iowa, but came back to him just the once. It didn't need reiterating. It wasn't a promise any more, just a statement of fact.