Obama’s election spins a Web of tears

Magic Johnson went on Larry King last Wednesday evening. King asked him what he thought of the election. “Oh man. Last night I cried like a baby, Larry.”

Magic? Crying? Is Mercury in retrograde or something?

Then Will Smith went on Oprah. “Did you cry?” Oprah asked. “Did you cry? Did you cry?” (She had cried in front of millions during President-elect Obama’s election night speech, so presumably she wanted to know if Smith, an action hero, was in the Crybaby Club.)

He was.

And then there was Jesse Jackson. And Colin Powell. And Michael Salerno.

Who? Oh yeah, Salerno’s an IT manager out of Mahopac, N.Y. Barbecue enthusiast, avid reader, father of triplets. He wasn’t on TV like the other guys, and unlike the others, he’s white -- but you can still see a picture of him getting teary on election night, because he posted it on Flickr.

“I have never been more proud to be an American,” the caption says, and “yes, I’m crying.”

I found Salerno’s pic, along with dozens of other crying photos and videos, on Flickr and YouTube after several friends told me they’d cried on election night. Two of them were guys I’ve known for a decade without seeing them cry a single time.

In one YouTube video, a blue-eyed guy named Sam with big tattoos and no shirt completely loses it, bawling wordlessly for seven minutes during Obama’s victory speech: a classic.

In another, a pretty 18- year-old girl named Whitney cries in a smiling way that looks almost like laughter. “I’m such a loser,” she says. “I’m so happy.”

“I cried too,” wrote four of the video’s 11 commenters, with one adding, “and I’m not even American.”

That was it. The Obama Crying thing was, as far as I was concerned, a full-blown epidemic. One worth further study and explication. I did the only thing I knew how: I went to SurveyMonkey.com.

Querying criers

Survey Monkey lets you create free surveys and send them to people online. It’s easy. So I made a questionnaire: Did you cry on election night? If so, when was the last time you cried before that? And I asked respondents to specify their gender, age range and party affiliation.

Next, I took the hyperlink to my survey and posted it all over Facebook. Seeking parity, I posted it in a number of groups representing many distinct points along the ideological spectrum. I went from the famous group called “One Million Strong for Barack” to “1,000,000 Strong for McCain Palin” to “Reduce the Drinking Age to 18,” and to “weddings 2008.”

Another half-hour of this and Facebook decided I was a spammer and revoked all of my posting privileges, dealing a serious blow to my ability to disseminate the survey. So I turned to Twitter, where I “tweeted” a link to the survey to all 468 of the people who had, through the Web Scout blog, opted to follow my “feed.”

I popped open a bag of Fritos and let the results trickle in.

Some hours later, my survey had attracted 133 respondents. And are you ready for this? Fully 75% of them said they had cried or “sort of” cried on election night. (I’d included a box for people to say what “sort of” meant, and the consensus was that if you welled up but didn’t actually overflow, that’s “sort of” crying. Fair enough.)

More statistics: 33% of the criers/wellers were male. About half were between 15 and 25, a quarter 26 to 35, and another quarter were 36 to 45; 67% Democrats, 18% Republicans, 11% independents. An impressive spread across all categories -- perhaps this really was a phenomenon!

Among the written explanations were a few gems:

* “As the mother of a biracial child I have always been afraid that she would never be accepted by her peers. She wouldn’t be ‘white enough’ or ‘black enough.’ And seeing that an entire country can accept this biracial man as their leader, and also knowing how much the world as a whole supports him -- gives me so much hope for my own daughter’s future.”

* “So proud that Americans elected a smart President! I also cried when I got a thank you text message from Barack Obama on my phone.”

* “I cried because I was so devastated that my country would choose someone who was going to destroy what America was founded on.”

Rude awakening

I called Jack Glaser, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley who has written extensively on race, politics, emotion and the Internet. Quite possibly he could help me publish my findings in some obscure academic journal. When I asked him what he thought of my results, there was a pause. He then told me my methodology was completely flawed and my results scientifically meaningless.

I nearly cried.

“Whenever you have a survey where people voluntarily participate, you tend to overrepresent people who feel strongly one way or the other,” Glaser said.

As a consolation prize, Glaser allowed that “it does look like there’s more expressed emotion after this election than there typically is. There’s a huge release on the partisan level,” he said, “And also a big exhilaration on the civil rights side. And the two sort of intertwine.”

So no science was had here today. Still, I count this as a victory, skewed and warped as it may be, for the social Web. It turns out that a few minutes on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, plus a bit of survey monkeying, quickly revealed 100 people who had cried on election night. I don’t think you need science to see that there’s something happening there.

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david.sarno@latimes.com