Bill Moyers Journal interviewed two Columbia University professors Patricia Williams and Eric Foner regarding the election of President Elect Obama.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what do you think accounts for that catharsis that seemed to occur on Tuesday night?
ERIC FONER: You know there's a number of things that I think we would agree. I mean, particularly among young people, this sense that really change is in the air. And you know, the way both of us saw our students galvanized by-
PATRICIA WILLIAMS: Yeah.
ERIC FONER: -by this campaign. And I think that feeling just is so widely shared around the country that we really need a new departure, given what's happened in the last eight years.
PATRICIA WILLIAMS: And not to be ungracious, I do think it was the suspense of the last eight years. I think there was so much suspense around the conduct of the last two elections, the fear of voter fraud, the sense that this was very close, as it was really very close in the popular vote if not the Electoral College that the great suspense and the sense of two elections' worth of disappointment it was like uncapping all that champagne we were holding onto the last eight years.
BILL MOYERS: But your students were just kids in 2000.What was it that so galvanized them about this particular outcome?
ERIC FONER: You know, Obama's campaign is a 20th — 21st century campaign. And I think he represents something that is maybe more powerful to young people than even, you know, to our generation. The notion of a society that in which race is still an existent fact but is not the determinant of people's lives where people, you know, my daughter has friends of all different backgrounds and ethnicities, races. And it doesn't even matter anymore to them. And I think that, you know, that's a vision of the future of America. And I think young people really, really, you know, found that very appealing.
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