KEY POINTS:
Everyone in the Windy City was a political animal last night n and almost everyone was a Barack Obama fan. Not that everyone was certain Grant Park, where Barack Obama was due on stage at who knew what late hour, was the smartest place to be.
Like New York's Times Square on New Year's Eve, it beckoned as the spot where hoopla and history would collide.
City officials seemed to be doing everything possible to keep the expected throng at the park to a civilised minimum. With confidence running high among Obama supporters - "Obama wins" badges and T-shirts were already on sale by mid-afternoon - Chicago Mayor Richard Daley predicted that one million souls would descend on the park, but police officials were crossing their fingers that the number would be much lower.
Only the 75,000-odd folk with tickets issued by the campaign were in an area anywhere close to where Mr Obama would be standing. Nor was he due to face them, but rather the terraces of scaffolding where, by yesterday morning, scores of photographers and TV cameramen were setting up. Unusually two bulletproof barriers had been erected on either side of the podium.
Members of the public without tickets were being directed to another section of the park with views of the proceedings relayed to them via giant television screens, while roughly 200 top donors and Hollywood celebrities were invited to rub shoulders with Mr Obama and his wife, Michelle, before and after his address in a marquee just behind and to the south of the stage. Two other tents were erected for the same purpose for the candidate's running mate, Joe Biden, and his most ardent backers, as well as for Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party.
Not that the tents offered anything too fancy. Instead of flowers, large sprays of miniature stars-and-stripes flags decorated each of the 12-place round tables. Catering staff wheeled in cases of beer - Honker's Ale and Goose Island, two local brews - for the guests to swig. If there was to be champagne, it was not in evidence when this reporter snuck under the canvas flaps.
Precisely which bold-face names would be in attendance was a matter of conjecture up until the party's start. Some reports had the Obama headquarters discouraging the likes of Susan Sarandon, Ben Affleck, Jay-Z and Sean "Diddy" Combs from showing up. It was Barack's bash, not anyone else's. But two of his biggest supporters were expected at the site come what may - Oprah Winfrey, who offered him one of his campaign's biggest endorsements, and the actor Samuel L Jackson.
It was Mr Obama, in fact, who the people of Chicago - and the thousands of tourists, international and American, who had flooded into the city, filling its hotel rooms and restaurants for days for this very momentn wanted to see, the man who has been promising so much and who has been working so hard. The man who until two years ago was barely known, but who now is as famous as Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan ever were in every city of every continent.
"The journey ends," Mr Obama mused after casting his own vote in an elementary school on Chicago's South Side yesterday morning. Although even the end seemed a bit protracted as he and wife Michelle, accompanied by their two daughters, spent an inordinately long time at the voting machine. "I noticed that Michelle took a long time, though. I had to check to see who she was voting for," he said later, adding: "Voting with my daughters was a big deal."
For the Obamas it was a day of moments to savour, privately in the voting booth and, later before a tide of faces in Grant Park.
- INDEPENDENT
