Ah, what a relief:

Obama.

I stayed up till after 6 AM Moscow time - decided it was time to switch off the computer when one of my friends on Facebook posted this update: "[...] says it out loud: McCain can't win."

I'm very happy.

A coincidence, of course, but it was only last night that I ran into Vanity Fair's choice of Top 25 News Photographs - among which is this image of a 1930 lynching in Indiana and this one of Dorothy Counts on her way to school in North Carolina in 1957. And today, the Chicago Tribune writes this in an editorial:

[...] Obama’s victory is one of those events that reveal how far the nation has traveled. When he was born in 1961, African-Americans risked death merely to register to vote in some Southern states. The pivotal civil rights and voting rights laws had yet to be enacted. Yet today, the nation is willing to entrust its future to a man whose father was black. [...]

Another coincidence, perhaps, but the New York Times ran this piece about Ukraine yesterday:

Four years ago this month, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of this capital city to take back an election they saw as stolen. That outpouring, called the Orange Revolution, brought fresh hopes for freedoms and for a release from the country’s Soviet past that few other former republics had ever experienced.

The early promise of those days frayed in recent years, but economically times were good, and the country always seemed to manage.

But now, confronted by the global financial crisis, the new Ukraine is facing the single biggest test of its stability, and its leaders, by most accounts, seem to be close to failing. [...]

I hope that in the next four years Obama is not going to screw it all up the way our whole bunch has since 2004.

As for the Republican Party, losing this election seems like a good "exit strategy" everyone's been looking for.