KEY POINTS:
The US media proclaimed the American public's newfound maturity for returning an African-American president-elect.
The Chicago Tribune reports that when Obama was born, in 1961, African-Americans risked being murdered for trying to vote in the southern states.
"The pivotal civil rights and voting rights laws had yet to
be enacted. Yet today, the nation is willing to entrust its future to a man whose father was black. His election is a moving vindication of the ideals on which this nation was founded," reports the Tribune.
It is worth reporting that the southern states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina all went to McCain.
The Tribune continues: "There are other reasons to celebrate the election of this citizen of Chicago, the only one ever elevated to the White House. Obama won by appealing to a deep yearning for national reconciliation and unity that spans partisan divides."
The New York Times reports Obama's victory as a "national catharsis, a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies".
The paper reports that it was Obama's call for change that won him the election and also makes mention of skin colour.
"But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation's fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago," reports the Times.
"As the returns became known, and Mr. Obama passed milestone after milestone winning Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and New Mexico, many Americans rolled into the streets of New York, Washington, Chicago and elsewhere to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave," the paper reports.
The paper goes on to describe the presidential race as one of the "most remarkable" in political history that attracted immense public interest.
"Throughout the day, people lined up at the polls for hours - some showing up before dawn to cast their votes. Aides to both campaigns said that anecdotal evidence suggested record-high voter turnout," reports the Times.
The LA Times also draws on American history when describing the enormity of Obama's victory.
"A nation that was founded by slave owners and seared by civil war and generations of racial strife delivered a smashing electoral college victory to the 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, who forged a broad, multiracial, multiethnic coalition.
"His victory was a leap in the march toward equality: When Obama was born, people with his skin colour could not even vote in parts of America, and many were killed for trying," reports the LA Times.
The paper reports that McCain was "burdened by his party's toxic image".
"In winning the White House, Obama to a large degree remade the electorate: About one in 10 of those casting ballots Tuesday were doing so for the first time. Though that number was about the same as four years ago, most of the newcomers were under age 30, about a fifth were black and a fifth were Latino. That was greater than their share of the overall population, and those groups voted overwhelmingly for Obama," reports the LA Times.
The Washington Post's political blogger Chris Cillizza said two factors stand out in Obama's victory
"The remarkable unpopularity of President George W. Bush and the Democratic nominee's massive fundraising edge," writes Cillizza
He goes on to point out that in the national exit polls, only 27 per cent approved of Bush while about three times that number disapproved.
"Barack Obama's victory tonight affirms a fundamental re-shaping of the electoral map that has dominated American politics for the better part of the last decade," writes Cillizza.
