Election Night

By: Gideon Yago | December 02, 2008 | Politics Profile

I am a sucker for ritual behavior: weddings, birthdays, baby-namings, confirmations, graduations, Boy Scout inductions, reunion tours, exorcisms, space shuttle launches, etc. Need a warm body to help externalize neurosis through group activity? I’m your guy. In part, my attraction to rituals comes from the fact that I spend most of my days as a shut-in, scribbling alone, surrounded by books and an ISDN line, occasionally engaging in actual interpersonal contact when I have to, say, buy coffee or pay the Chinese food delivery guy. But my thing for rituals is also because I think there’s nothing more American than to be part of a crowd. We are a nation of the roiling mass: of the people, by the people and for the people. And when it comes to rituals, none is more American than standing shoulder to shoulder in a pit watching returns on election night, catching the final scene and final act — live — in our country’s once-every-four-years passion play.
I have done this three times in my life. My first election night was in 2000, covering the returns, at age 22, from the largest press riser I had ever seen — an eight-story behemoth of lights and lintels erected in Austin, Texas. I was a cub reporter for MTV News, which that night was breaking into a Real World marathon to update live broadcasts from both Texas and Tennessee about what would prove to be the closest election in my lifetime. The evening was positively manic: states were called for Gore, states were pulled for Gore; states were called for Bush, states were pulled for Bush. The ecstatic crowd assembled on the steps of the Texas State Capitol went berserk when Gore refused to concede, and by 6 a.m., as the party machines began cranking out recount operatives to Florida, I walked off site convinced that I had just witnessed my first piece of history unfold in real time. That feeling is a narcotic and the reason most journalists stay in the business.
But 2004 was a different story. I was stationed in Boston because I had spent the better part of that year covering Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry (although, to be honest the election was largely a Bush versus Not Bush contest). With no Republican challenging the incumbent president, all the action was on the Democratic ticket. But the stardust that infused the memories of my first election night was replaced by the freezing mist that enveloped the crowd that came to cheer Kerry in Boston’s Copley Square. For me, the weather matched the cold cynicism that had crept in me after a couple of spins on the media dance floor. I was a more seasoned journalist at that point. I had lived through 9/11 in New York and covered my first war. I was savvier about what I was witnessing: not, as I thought, some ground-up referendum on American ideals, but a calculated power play by two teams of hardcore cynics. And as the Kerry campaign pulled the CNN feed to keep the crowd from dispersing or rioting, I realized that the little American ritual I had gone chasing had the capacity to turn into a crass orgy between power seekers and the defenders of the status quo. I left the press riser that evening convinced that I had it all wrong. Elections weren’t about America; it was just watching the two parties duke it out — a title bout and nothing more.
This year was different. Two years ago, I quit journalism entirely. I had successfully sold my first screenplay and, still a little nauseated from spending my days in newsrooms, I decided to cut bait and pursue a new life as a writer. I moved to Los Angeles. I turned down opportunities to work on campaigns, both Democratic and Republican. I spent the primary season on the couch drinking. I had some regrets, like watching Obama’s now infamous “Yes We Can” speech after the night of the Iowa caucuses, feeling distinct pangs of jealousy toward my colleagues still on the campaign trail. I had signed up to watch history unfold and the closest I had gotten was the Dean Scream? Lame. But I was never motivated enough to get back in the game. This was to be my first election as a civilian. And as the October days crept closer towards election night, I decided that there was still one place, one time and one way for a civilian to be in the heart of it: cheering on the returns as part of the crowd.
I picked Chicago. If Obama were to win, as it looked increasingly likely in the final days of the campaign, it would mean I had a chance to be there firsthand as a racial barrier dropped once and for all in this country. It was as though someone had given me an open invitation to be a part of history as a face in the crowd. If I had a chance to stand on the National Mall while Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech or to kiss a candy striper amongst the throngs in Times Square on VJ-Day in 1945, I would have taken it in a minute. So, I bought a ticket to Chicago and started badgering every Democratic operative I knew for tickets to the rally in Grant Park.
I struck out. No longer being in the news media, I had no real favors to horse-trade, and being that I had limited finances and offering my body would only have hurt my cause, I decided to do the next best thing, which was rush the fucking gates. I arrived in Chicago the afternoon of Nov. 4 armed with a video camera, a change of socks, petty cash to bribe cops and a backpack to smuggle booze onto Hutchison Field. My plan was simple, get in early, get as close as I could and stay put. After a quick stop at a liquor store to buy overpriced champagne from behind bulletproof glass, I joined the crowds assembling in Grant Park.
As the sun began to set, I parked myself far behind the press riser towards the far perimeter of the field. The world’s news organizations, several thousand passionate volunteers, about 30,000 history gawkers and Oprah all stood between the flag-ringed stage and me. I could see the glow of the klieg lights above the horizon of human heads in front of me. But since I am not very limber and most of the nearby trees were already filling their branches with people hoping for better views, I would have to rely on the giant screens broadcasting CNN to be my guide that night. Once the sun went down, the detailing on several nearby skyscrapers — to take the shape of the American flag by keeping office lights on, or to spell “Obama ’08” — provided a storybook backdrop for the park, and by 7 p.m., when the first polls closed on the East Coast, the dense mass of humanity in Grant Park had approached mosh pit levels of saturation.
The mood was cautious. Even though nearly everyone on the street who was on the perimeter of Grant Park was either wearing or selling some kind of Obama memorabilia, the capacity for Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — especially after 2000 and 2004 — was well known. While the odds were long against a McCain victory, it was not impossible. And should Obama lose that night, there was no telling how the crowd would react. Chicago is a city that does not mess around. In 1992, her citizens torched her streets to celebrate an NBA Championship victory for the Bulls. If Obama lost, what was shaping up to be a great night for civil rights could have turned into a bad night at the Source Awards. I set about finding out who some of the people were around me, and recording their impressions for my video diary to pass the time and kill the tension.
If Wolf Blitzer’s great mastery of the obvious about the crowds stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was that they were “so poor and so black,” Grant Park would be best characterized as so black and so young. I was literally sandwiched between the two demographic blocs that were largely responsible for Obama’s victory in the primaries and, that night, victory in the general election. To my left was a crew of students from Columbia College of the Arts in Chicago. To my right were three generations of African-American women from a nail salon on Chicago’s South Side. Mostly people talked openly about the significance of the day, the campaign, Obama himself. They gave in, in small ways, to the audacity of hope, joking about what Obama might say that night or the changes that would come to the White House if he were president, praising Michelle Obama as the secret reason he had made it that far. For the college students, it was their first election. For the women from the South Side, same story, only the youngest of them was in her 30s and saw this election as the first that was actually worth participating in. Then the polls began to close and the predictable states turned red and blue. Every time the most mundane piece of information was announced about a McCain misstep or loss, the crowd instantly went into a spasm of cheers. Booze began to circulate. The smell of lit joints filled the air. When the lynchpins of Pennsylvania and Virginia fell, it was as though a countdown to victory had begun. I never actually heard CNN call the election for Obama. The deafening roar of 300,000-plus people let me know instead.

The first thing I remember hearing over the shouts was from one of the South Side women who was standing near me. She just kept shaking her head and saying, “We’re Back.” We’re back. America, the idea of America as a meritocracy and a place of opportunity, where the definition of freedom would continue to unfurl for new people in new ways, had had a very good night. Hope — for a little while — had won the day and catharsis — for those who had come to doubt the politicians, the process, the country itself — was something to be felt and shared. By the time Obama took the stage to thank the crowd, it was difficult to find someone in that masses that was unmoved, unaware of what we were witnessing. America, in one man’s election, had turned a corner.
It took almost a half hour to even begin to leave Grant Park. The sheer size of the crowd made an easy exit impossible. I popped the champagne bottles in my backpack and started drinking with my new friends. As I finally made it out of the park, I passed the press riser, where reporters were still doing live hits, opinioning on the significance of the night for the satellite-bound, televised audience — a step above the crowd, apart from the raw energy, the democracy, the numbers, the people. I saw a producer I knew and waved. He waved back. “What are you doing there?” he mouthed at me from the riser. I couldn’t respond over the shouts of the crowd, but I smiled, gave him a thumbs up, tried to let him know that it was all good. I had finally done it right this year. I had been a civilian on a good night for the power of the average citizen. I went to join the party in the street.

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