Can we count up now?

A retrospective of my favorite parts from the election, one month later, and with a whole lot more months to anticipate.

Senator Obama was doing press interviews by telephone in a holding room between events. Sometime later as he was getting ready to begin his event, he asked me if I was photographing his shoes. When I said yes, he told me that he had already had them resoled once since he entered the race a year earlier. Providence, R.I., 3/1/2008. (Click 'Show More Images' about five times to get to this one and its caption.)

Best Flickr set ever:


Harbinger, November 1999:

The BBC's Washington correspondent, Paul Reynolds, said the speech was designed to demonstrate that the Texas governor does have a world vision, despite some slips up recently which betrayed his lack of experience.

The meta-political observer, October 1988, when I voted for Bush in our kindergarten election, probably because I didn't know how to draw, much less pronounce, a "Dukakis":

"Black," in other words, could be useful, and even a moral force, a way for white Americans to attain more perfect attitudes: "His color is an enormous plus. … How moving it is, and how important, to see a black candidate meet and overcome the racism that lurks in virtually all of us white Americans," Anthony Lewis had noted in a March column explaining why the notion that Jesse Jackson could win was nonetheless "a romantic delusion" of the kind that had "repeatedly undermined" the Democratic party. "You look at what Jesse Jackson has done, you have to wonder what a Tom Bradley of Los Angeles could have done, what an Andy Young of Atlanta could have done," I heard someone say on one of the Sunday shows after the Jackson campaign had entered its "historic" (or, in the candidate's word, its "endless") phase.