During the campaign of 2004 -- which this morning seems about as long ago as the campaign of 1832 -- Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., went to the White House for a congressional meeting with President George W. Bush, wearing a new campaign button.

The president gave the button a perplexed look, and asked, "Osama?"

No, said Schakowsky, it was Illinois' Democratic Senate candidate, Barack Obama. Bush shrugged and said he'd never heard of him.

"Mr. President," said Schakowsky, "you will."

This morning -- sooner than either of them, or anybody else, might have expected -- everyone has heard of Barack Obama, and the United States has elected its first African American president. The voting marks the end of a long campaign, but surely the beginning of something even bigger.

During her campaign for the Democratic nomination, back in the winter and spring, Hillary Clinton liked to find women in their nineties, born into a country where they couldn't vote, eager to vote for a woman for president. It was intended to be moving, and it was.

But Barack Obama has now been elected to lead a country where, at the time of his birth, millions of Americans who looked like him were kept from voting by violence and intimidation. Obama campaigned and contended in states where, during his preschool years, his parents' very marriage would have been illegal.

This, like the lines of people waiting three hours in the Georgia sun to vote, is something more than moving. The demonstration that there is now literally no position closed to an African American brings a partial closing to the nation's longest and most agonizing division.

Obama's triumph, over the 21 months of his campaign, was not simply to show that an African American could be a serious candidate for president, and to electrify that community. It was to create a sense of possibility in a wider audience, especially a younger audience, to make them believe that a different kind of politics was possible. From the beginning of his campaign, Obama has had a particular appeal to voters too young for their cynicism to have hardened.

His victory was no narrow squeeze; Obama ran better among white voters than any Democratic presidential candidate in decades.

For two decades, it has seemed that American politics has been locked into a punishing, unproductive trench warfare between the two parties, an endless refighting of battles about culture and country dating from the 1960s. Watching one recent national convention, David Broder of The Washington Post commented to a younger colleague that when the Baby Boomers reached nursing homes, they would be pounding on each others' walkers and yelling about Vietnam. The Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years tended to underline his point.

Obama, from a later time and free of that tie-dyed burden, offered an opportunity to finally change the subject, an opportunity the country has now embraced.

Colin Powell, in his important endorsement of Obama, said he thought Obama could be a "transformational" president. It's a big word, and a judgment finally left to historians from future decades, if not future centuries.

But Powell's point was that Obama, as not only the first African American president but a product of a post-civil rights world, a figure of extraordinary eloquence, analysis and ability to connect, carries the chance of transforming our politics, and both the way the United States sees itself in the world and the way the world sees the United States.

In 2008, these are all desperately needed changes.

Every president takes office promising to make the United States a different country than it was. Few succeed, and Obama's White House plans, like those of any other president, deserve to be viewed through that prism of improbability.

But through his historic campaign, and his impressive, once implausible triumph, Obama has already done something that few presidents manage during their entire term in office.

He has shown us that we are a different country than we thought we were.

And from that realization, we can now go forward.

This piece is courtesy of The Oregonian Editorial Board, 11/05/2008.

With an over-emphasized focus on veteran pitching, Seattle Mariners Bill Bavasi has, unfortunately, dug his own grave in the Emerald City.

Signing Free Agent Carlos Silva to a 4-year/$48 million contract and trading young talents Adam Jones and George Sherrill to Baltimore for ace-to-be Erik Bedard were both seen as good moves at the time they were made.  Retrospect has proven that the Mariners overpaid for Silva (3-6, 5.96 ERA in 13 starts) and gave up too much (Sherrill - 20 SV, 3.04 ERA; Jones - .256, 3 HR, 24 RBI) for Bedard (4-4, 4.47 ERA in 10 starts), but hindsight is often 20/20.

Nonetheless, bringing in an innings-eater like Silva and trading for a top-tier starter like Bedard should have shored up the starting rotation after the dismissals of Horacio Ramirez and Jeff Weaver, when they proved to be ineffective for most of 2007.  For a multitude of reasons, this has not happened.

Mel Stottlemyre was brought in as the new Pitching Coach and was supposed to turn Felix Hernandez into the beast-like youngster everyone thought he would become; Erik Bedard was supposed to flourish under Stottlemyre's tutleage, and Jarrod Washburn and Miguel Batista were giong to be renewed.  As of right now, the Mariners have assembled and produced the worst starting five in the major leagues, statistically speaking.  With the exception of Hernandez (3.29 ERA), 3 of Seattle's starting five have ERA's of 5.90 or higher; Bedard's ERA rests uncomfortably at 4.47 and he's lasted more than 5 innings in just 6 of his 10 starts.  Miguel Batista and Jarrod Washburn are both sporting WHIPs approaching 2.00.

Sadly for the Mariners, new Hitting Coach Jeff Pentland hasn't seen any benefit to his employment, either.  Richie Sexson picked up right where he left off from 2007, hovering around the Mendoza line for the first month and a half of the season before beleaguered Manager John McLaren finally saw fit to bench the "Whiff Machine", as he has become known in Seattle.  Adrian Beltre, regarded as one of the top Free Agent pickups after he signed with Seattle after his breakout 2004 season in Los Angeles Dodger blue, when he belted 48 round-trippers, drove in 121 baserunners, and hit an uncharacteristic-like .334.  Since then, he has averaged (2005-07) just 23 HRs and 92 RBIs for the Mariners.  His power numbers look better so far for 2008 (13 HRs thus far, projecting to 35 for the season), but his batting average and OBP have dropped significantly from expectations.

The "Brad Wilkerson Experiment", brought to Seattle by Bavasi, lasted one month before the M's gave him his unconditional release.

Ichiro Suzuki, ever the exemplar of clutch and smart hitting, is batting just .289, over 40 points below his career average.  Jose Vidro, Kenji Johjima and Raul Ibanez are all hitting well below pre-season expectations.  Only Yuniesky Betancourt and Jose Lopez have improved at the plate from 2007.

One can only draw the following conclusion: the coaching staff for the Mariners must be the most inept and unsuccessful coaching staff in Major League Baseball.  Stottlemyre and Pentland were supposed to help improve the players, not assist them into regressions that can simply be described as horrific to witness.

Manager John McLaren, ever the diplomat and often the quiet librarian, erupted into an expletive-filled rant in front of local media after his club was swept in a three-game series by division rival Los Angeles Angels.  The purpose for that rant cannot be determined (it should have happened when Seattle was six games out of first place in the AL West, not sixteen), and it had a bit of a "stage" feel to it, as if Bavasi and Team President Chuck Armstrong had pushed McLaren for the outburst.

A three-game series in Fenway Park against the Red Sox begins tonight with Felix Hernandez going for the Mariners.  This is a crucial series for the Mariners, because if they cannot muster the team spirit and chemistry Bavasi had hoped would develop when he made his off-season moves, then their back is broken and the downward spiral will continue until the eventual and predictable fire sale of veteran talent takes place.

2009 will bring us a new version of the Seattle Mariners, and while the likeliheood of this season being salvaged to an even .500 record is highly unlikely, a respectable finish and some definitive teamwork will go a long way in allowing those players an opportunity to return the following season.  It's a matter of professional integrity, and I sincerely hope these men have it.