On the post-election reaction beat in Ukraine!

So the 2008 election has come and gone.  I’m certainly pleased with both the result and the fact that I’m from a blue state again!  For the next four years anyway…

I must admit, though, that I have felt strangely disconnected—like a spectator—during this election process.  In 2004 I helped initiate a campus-wide effort to register young voters, helped coordinate campaign visits by a US Senate candidate and a vice-presidential candidate’s daughter, canvassed door-to-door in Montgomery County, and generally spent all my free time in October doing something related to the election.

This year?  I spent hours nervously reading news on the Internet in Ukrainian Internet cafes.  I didn’t even vote (because I never received my absentee ballot—damn the nefarious interloper in the postal network between here and Ohio!).  And, honestly, it didn’t really matter.  Things turned out about as good as could have hoped.  Ohio still went for Obama, even without my vote.  I guess that’s the strangest part:  having worked so hard in 2004 for naught, while not even casting a ballot in 2008 but witnessing all the changes I had hoped for.

But anyway, what I intended to write about:  the local reaction to the election of Barack Obama.