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US ’08: Welcome to Vancouver’s Obamaland

Welcome to Obamaland.

The trendy Yaletown Brew Pub, complete with sandblasted brick walls and beamed ceiling, was the noisy home tonight for a loud, jostling, energetic and cautiously optimistic crowd as Vancouver’s chapter of Democrats Abroad gathered with its Canadian allies and supporters.

The Obama fans were watching early American election returns on large TV screens, usually devoted to pro sports broadcasts but all tuned tonight to CNN.

The pub was already at standing-room-only status when I arrived at 4:00 p.m., and Democrats Abroad volunteers were doing a brisk business selling Obama t-shirts and buttons as eager politics junkies of all ages ordered drinks and bar food.

Early observation by The Tyee’s crack investigative team suggested that white wine and beer were the most popular drink orders among Democrats Abroad.

However, this conclusion, like the early media projections about the vote’s outcome that elicited alternating cheers and groans from the partisan crowd, is only preliminary and would need to be confirmed or denied as the evening progresses.

More cheers than groans rose from Vancouver’s Obama supporters in the first hour and a half of the evening’s long march. CNN predicted just after 5:00 p.m. that the Democratic nominee would take ten states, giving him 77 Electoral College votes, with McCain projected to win in four states that would yield 34.

Bruce Esdon, a burly delivery driver from North Vancouver, dropped in to the event on a break from work to continue a vigil he’d started at 5:00 a.m. this morning when he got up early to watch the first news from America.

Esdon, a black American born in Missouri, has lived in Canada for 30 years and is still a US citizen. He told The Tyee he was very excited about the Obama candidacy, something that would have been unimaginable when he was growing up in the American South.

“It is time for some integrity and intelligence in American leadership,” he said. “I think Obama can provide that. I’m hopeful, and I love being able to talk with my 16-year-old son about this. Obama is a great source of pride for my son.”

Karen Young, an American émigré from Ohio, was watching the TV screens raptly when I tore her away for a moment of conversation. She told us she’d been in Canada for 37 years, and proudly told the story of a trip she took recently to visit towns in the BC interior and sign up eligible Americans to vote.

“In Kamloops, we registered Lesra Martin, the lawyer who helped free Hurricane Carter from prison,” she said. “Besides that, we signed up 40 new American voters outside an Alice Cooper concert.”

When I first spoke with Young early in the afternoon, she predicted that her home state would probably go Republican again. As your intrepid reporter exited the noisy bar to come back to an outmoded desktop computer, Young called me aside to point out that early returns in Ohio were suggesting that it might support Obama this time out.

“I am so excited,” Young enthused, “that I am almost in tears.”

Noticed among the crowd: a young Obama fan sporting a t-shirt proclaiming “Ban Republican Marriage.” Pausing to chat for a minute with the fashionably bald young man wearing it, we learned he had moved to Canada this summer, drawn by the chance to marry his same-sex partner here, an option not open to him in his native New York.

Rick, who asked us not to use his last name, was forgiving of the fact that Obama, like his Republican opponent, had come out against gay marriage.

“I believe in his heart he supports us,” he insisted. “But he has to get elected. Maybe in four or eight years a presidential candidate will be able to support equal marriage. I want Obama to win, and I am encouraged by the early returns, but I’m a numbers guy and I’m still nervous. These predictions are all based on tiny returns.”

Tom Sandborn is a contributing editor to The Tyee.

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