Oprah
Winfrey walked onto the stage of her postelection special on Wednesday to
the tune of “God Bless America” and just screamed “Whooooooo!” over and over.
Then she held up the full-page picture of Barack
Obama on the cover of The Chicago Sun-Times. “Oh, my God, all right, O.K.,”
Ms. Winfrey said breathlessly. “I’ve got two words for you, America: ‘Mr.
President.’ ”
On “The View,” the long-sparring co-hosts exchanged congratulatory fist jabs
— even Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who campaigned alongside the Republican
vice-presidential nominee, Sarah
Palin. On MSNBC, the film director Spike
Lee described Mr. Obama’s victory as a “seismic shift,” and the “Today”
co-host Hoda Kotb told Kathie
Lee Gifford, “I don’t know in my lifetime if I have ever seen anything of
this magnitude — I mean forget elections, anything.”
The election wasn’t just a historic milestone, it turned out to be a
television event as thrilling and uncharted as the first lunar landing: For many
long, nerve-racking hours, attention was focused on the clock and a tangle of
numbers and technological details, then suddenly, and almost shockingly, a feat
long awaited, but never fully expected, came to be.
On Tuesday, more than 60 million people watched the returns, and anchors and
commentators felt compelled to punctuate the moment.
“I think this is the end of the conservative era,” Pat Buchanan said on
MSNBC. Tom
Brokaw of NBC called the election “the end of apathy.”
Everybody called it unforgettable. By Wednesday, as images of the newly
elected first family filled television news segments and clips of Mr. Obama’s
acceptance speech were shown over and over, anchors and their guests mostly
wanted to relive the moment — giving descriptions of where they were, what they
were doing, and how they felt when the news hit. (There was many a confessional
detour, from Dan
Rather reminiscing about covering the civil rights movement to the former
White House adviser David Gergen describing his youth in a segregated
South.)
It was labeled by almost all as a postracial election, but African-Americans
had the floor. Ms. Winfrey, who on Tuesday night squeezed in with the crowds
gathered in Grant Park in Chicago to hear Mr. Obama’s speech, was filmed weeping
on the shoulder of a complete stranger in front of her. “It was the most
electrifying and emotional night I have ever experienced,” she said.
Representative John
Lewis, Democrat of Georgia and a civil rights leader, told Ms. Winfrey that
when Mr. Obama won Pennsylvania he had “an out-of-body experience. I jumped so
high I started shouting. I was at Ebenezer Church; I just embarrassed
myself.”
Whoopi
Goldberg said on “The View” she called her mother and asked if she ever
dreamed such a thing could happen in her lifetime, and was told, “No.”
Sherri Shepherd, who is also African-American, tried to express her feelings
and was so overcome she could barely get her words out. Barbara
Walters confessed that she didn’t shed a tear on Tuesday night, but said
that while brushing her teeth on Wednesday morning, she heard an excerpt of the
Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “I found myself crying,” she
said.
And Ms. Walters needled Ms. Hasselbeck, telling her archly, “All eyes are on
you.” Some in the audience snickered: Ms. Hasselbeck was still arguing against
Mr. Obama’s “associations” with the likes of the Rev.
Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and William Ayers on Monday, at times so passionately
it looked like she and her more liberal co-host Joy Behar would come to blows.
Ms. Hasselbeck said she had a change of heart when explaining the election
results to her young daughter. “No one lost today,” Ms. Hasselbeck said mistily.
“Seriously, and God knows I fought hard on the other side, but today is a
victory for this country.”
Though the hosts of “Fox & Friends” remained dry-eyed, even they noted
that Mr. Obama’s victory was momentous.
There have been other extraordinary events that put a pause on routine and
threw the country into a passionate babble of conversation, but in recent times,
they have mostly been bad news: presidential assassinations, hostage crises,
9/11, the invasion of Iraq and, most recently, the financial meltdown on Wall
Street. The election wasn’t a distraction like a celebrity arrest or a royal
wedding, it was something that actually mattered and wasn’t painful. And that
alone made it an amazing television
moment.