Obama elected president of US in historic win

In a decisive victory, Senator Barack Obama, the Democrat from Illinois, was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, and the first African-American to win the White House in American history.

After two years of campaigning, Obama easily defeated John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona, and made history as the first black to be elected to the nation’s highest office.

On January 20, 2009, Obama will be sworn into office, according to media reports, and will immediately face pressing issues that include the economic crisis in America, the continuing U.S. presence in Iraq and making good on his campaign promise to provide affordable health care to all Americans.

McCain lost in a number of key states, notably Ohio and Pennsylvania, seeing his hopes for victory dwindle as the voting results came in. Ohio, a state that has not been won by a Democrat since the 1964 election, gave President George W. Bush a narrow victory and helped re-elect him in 2004.

Obama led an electoral landslide that saw the Democrats win majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress, clearly repudiating the eight years of the Republic administration led by Bush.

The victory by Obama, whose father was a black Kenyan and mother a white woman from Kansas, is a milestone in the history of the U.S., coming 45 years after the major civil rights movement in the country was at its peak.

The hard-fought campaign was dominated in the past several weeks by dire economic news, and it appears that the leadership shown by Obama and his proposals for economic recovery were convincing for many voters.

Exit polls that were conducted on Tuesday indicated that 60 percent of voters considered economic problems to be top issue facing the nation.

www.whitehouse.gov