My friend Jenna took this video on U Street last night. Quality isn't great, but you can get a feeling for the energy of the crowd. And it went on like this for hours.
By the way: This wasn't simply relief at the end of the Bush era. Late last night, I walked by the White House, where another impromptu rally had emerged to sing goodbye to our disgraced failure of an executive. That was an angry crowd. Satisfied and relieved, yes. But angry. It was a crowd still dealing with the demons of the past eight years. Not so on U Street, or across the rest of DC. Those were Obama crowds. They would not have existed for Clinton or Edwards. They were not simple satisfaction at a change from the Bush years. Indeed, Bush was a non-entity on the streets. These were crowds that were utterly joyous at the prospect of what they had just done: Elect a black president. Strike a blow for civil rights that many had presumed impossible. A win by a more traditional Democrat would have put Bush in the past, but there was a sense last night -- inchoate, but present -- that Obama's victory somehow represented a more decisive transition into the future. That wasn't a political judgment and it wasn't connected to policies. It was just a sense that an America that could do this was a different America than the one we had been living in for the past few years.
