“He has just provided a vision, an idealism, that we have all been looking for so many times,” Weygand adds. “This fella has really touched everybody — he’s touched us all, in every walk of life. He said something to us, in some way. And frankly, George Bush had a lot to do with it as well. George Bush gave us a large degree of despair. That despair had no place else to go except to [help] Barack Obama, because he gave us such vision.”
US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, the son of US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and a nephew of JFK, says was gratified that his father and his cousin Caroline were among Obama’s earliest high-profile supporters.
“The Clintons really worked this hard in Rhode Island and New England,” Kennedy says, “but I think what my dad did . . . was really to give the Good Housekeeping seal, to a lot of Democrats nationally, to go with Obama. And you saw that the week after the endorsement, Obama racked up a clutch of states throughout the Midwest and the far West. A lot of Democrats who may have traditionally felt almost obligated to go with the Clintons felt like they could take a second look with Obama, because that’s what their instincts told them to do.”
Asked about what effect Obama will have, Kennedy says, “It will make an enormous difference internationally, for one. He’s going to restore hope for America, returning a sense of idealism around the world to America — that it is the country of all people and of opportunity. Certainly, that has been decimated by this previous president . . . We once again become the inspiration for the world, and I think that’s a great thing. People want to believe in America.”
US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse says it would have been a good year for whoever the Democratic candidate was, “whether it was Hillary or Barack. [But] Barack did a better job in the primary of capturing the spirit of change, the impatience with the status quo, the sort of desire for a different vision . . . and he also had this amazing field operation that you saw in operation [Tuesday]. I think that combination was really powerful for him. He built on it through the regular campaign. . . . He’s captured America’s desire for change, for a different direction, in a very optimistic way.”
Asked about the impact of Obama’s win, Whitehouse says, “It will mean the world to the country, and it will make a big difference to me and the Senate. The Bush administra-tion, in addition to generally having horrible policies and bad ideas, also has had very little interest in governing, in dealing with the legislature, in dealing with Congress. They’ve basically wanted to have it kind of their way, and if we don’t want what they want, that kind of ends the discussion. They go on to something else.
“Most of the problems we have in this country right now are problems that working together and sitting down, we can repair — we can fix these things,” Whitehouse says. “And I think what Obama promises more than anything else is a return to rational debate through the established separated powers of government, and getting to the result through the way the Founding Fathers intended, instead of the kind of imperial ambitions of Bush and the very hard-edged way he had of playing politics.”
