You just knew that they were like broncos at a rodeo, waiting for the gate to open. At every United States (US) network, they already knew Barack Obama had won the election. Because the western states would go Democratic, and because that would give him enough electoral-college votes to put him over the top, they were just counting down the seconds.
What followed, in the hours that carried America into its new era, was something not seen in a long time. Crowds impatient for change in Washington, DC - a city so Democratic, one wonders who the seven per cent were who voted for John McCain - formed spontaneously outside the White House, and started the celebrations.
I'll bet the guards on the lawns were a little taken aback. This isn't the sort of thing one expects. In the 2000 election, pundits complained that more people tuned in to watch the Survivor 'reality' series than watched the debates. US democracy is meant to be something which politely ignores the people, and which they in return leave alone.
My mind went at once to the reports that followed another election, but long before. In 1833, the populist Andrew Jackson invited common folk to his inauguration. Mobs overran the White House. Men in home-made clothes and muddied boots stood on the furniture to get a look at their president. The crowds grew so big that it is said the staff poured punch in tubs and put it on the lawns to draw the revellers outside.
By today's standards, Andrew Jackson would hardly be considered progressive. Racist and expansionist - it was the Jacksonians who gave us the term 'manifest destiny' - Jackson's concept of universal suffrage did not extend to women, let alone blacks or native Americans. Still, his appeal to the working man, and his immense popularity, blew the lid off the American establishment. Jeffersonian elitism was destroyed forever.
American political system
Or at least, so it seemed. In a curious way, the American political system drifted back into a lethargy in the 20th century. Americans gradually turned their back on politics. They didn't vote so often. Eventually, many of them stopped paying attention altogether. By the end of the century, politics had settled into a business for consultants and marketing executives, who cobbled together coalitions and poll-tested policies to win not majorities, but just enough market share to sell their product.
This rule by the few was seen by some as a good thing. It apparently reconciled mass rule with the anxieties of those who, from the time of Ortega y Gasset and Walter Lippmann, worried that the masses weren't really fit to rule. But it gave democracy a bad name. Nor, in the end, did it seem to ensure that the best would always govern.
Viral messages
Before Barack, there was Howard Dean. He unnerved the Democratic establishment - still dominated by the favour-currying, Hollywood-hobnobbing Clintons - when he drew millions of young people over the Internet. But that turned out to be just a trial run.
The Obama campaign's mastery of the information revolution, its use of social-networking tools and viral messages brought millions of young Americans back into the political process. We were brutally reminded that Bill Clinton, who just a few years before seemed young and fresh, didn't use email. And John McCain seemed to be of another age.
They didn't know what hit them. Maybe they still don't. Obama professed his determination to keep his armies mobilised, saying he'd need them to push through his agenda.
Going over the heads of Congress, pressuring them through ordinary people, strengthening a popular president: for better or worse, the Jacksonian revolution may have just found its true heir.
John Rapley is president of Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI) an independent think tank affiliated to UWI, Mona. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.
