Obama’s unconventional election day
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Tuesday was anything but politics as usual, but Barack Obama’s election day wasn’t exactly what you might expect for a candidate who was just hours away from learning whether his campaign would become a watershed moment in American history.
Obama, in the words of his brother-in-law Craig Robinson, had a day that speaks to the sense of normality he projects.
Robinson, the basketball coach at Oregon State, spent much of the day with Obama, doing the things they often do, according to Mike Tokito of the Oregonian.
Robinson and Obama joined with friends in what has become an Obama election-day tradition: playing some basketball. They split into four teams and played for about two hours. Obama won one of the three games he played.
‘The only provision made for the future president,’ Tokito wrote, ‘was that you don’t accidentally give him a fat lip.’
The Obamas and Robinsons then sat down for a family meal at the Obamas’ home. ‘We just had a nice quiet dinner,’ Robinson said. ‘No TV on, no watching any returns.’
While the rest of the country was glued to TV screens to see history unfold, the Obamas and Robinsons were eating, talking about how the kids’ school was going ... until the news became unavoidable.
‘Everybody has these BlackBerrys now, and they were all blowing up, and nobody wanted to reach for theirs to see what was going on,’ Robinson told Tokito. ‘But at one point, at my sister’s house, you could hear a bunch of people cheering outside, saying, ‘Yay!’ And then we started hearing the helicopters over the house, and we were thinking, it must be going well.’
Well, indeed.
-- Mike James
