November 4, 2008, brought to a close the longest, costliest, and most eagerly anticipated presidential election in history.
The campaign itself was historic – both because of the vast sums of money spent by both sides and the presence of a minority candidate and a woman on the Democratic and Republican tickets, respectively.
Yet history continued to be made on election day. Senator Barack Obama’s victory meant that, for the first time, an African American candidate was elected president of the United States – an event that, for many, represented what The New York Times termed, “a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.”1