http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/05/AR2008110502623_pf.htmlBy Marc Fisher
Thursday, November 6, 2008; A24
It felt like Berlin after the Wall was breached. Something that had been imagined for so long, yet seemed impossible, just . . . happened. It felt like the American promise, fulfilled.
At the foot of the Key Bridge just after midnight, hundreds of Georgetown University students poured off the campus. "White House!" they shouted to one another, and off they ran, along M Street NW, down Pennsylvania Avenue, picking up pretty much the entire student body of George Washington University on their way.
I followed the car horns and the kids, and soon we were at the White House gates. There was no event, no speaker, just the triumph of American optimism, the happy counterpoint to the solidarity we felt after the gut punch of 9/11.
"Everybody's here," marveled Tim Nunn, 23, a student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He was recording the scene on his video camera, narrating as he edged his way through the crowd: "Not just black people, not just white people -- everybody." He'd been at home in Mitchellville, watching the returns on TV, and "I just had to see. This changes the way I look at myself as a black man and what I can accomplish in life."
Through the small hours yesterday, young people who grew up in a world of possibility and older people who lived through too much disappointment tumbled onto the streets of the city, jamming the plaza in front of the White House, releasing balloons that the winds carried straight toward George Bush's bedroom. Up on U Street NW, they gathered by the thousands, strangers exchanging high fives and fist bumps and hugs and a single word that suddenly morphed from an unusual name to a greeting, an exultation: "Obama."
In unison, they chanted, "Yes, we did!" and "President Obama!"
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