David Kurtz, reporting from Grant Park for Talking Points Memo TV, took a worthy, if jumbled and emotional, stab at unpacking the night’s symbolism:

I don’t in any way want to downplay the historic nature of the experience tonight…[Standing with mostly African Americans, laymen and media] their pride and emotion, it was hard for them to describe to me… it was for them a moment of great pride not just in a black man being elected and not just in all that the African American community has endured up to this point, but as one gentleman told me, it was the way that he won, and the kind of coalition that he put together…a rainbow in the truest sense. And so it’s not an easy analysis of simply the first black president elected or simply the first Democrat in eight years.

Kurtz also noted that on the field and in Obama’s speech there was less of a sense of “slaying the dragon” and more of a sense of shouldering a responsibility. The field report was a commendable attempt to flesh out—without chucking the prevailing air of triumphalism all around him—the ways in which the victory mattered.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, meanwhile, invoked Walter Cronkite, who stumbled monosyllabically as he reported Neil Armstrong’s moon-landing in 1969. Discussing Obama’s victory, Olbermann said, in what was a surprisingly apt summation:

Politically, that’s what it is. This is ‘man on the moon’…in terms of how we interrelate, and also in a smaller subset of this political story—this perfect storm forming for several years in this country, coming to a fulmination [culmination?] in this election. These two things—one in giant letters to be written, and one in slightly smaller letters, but still very important ones, coming together in one night. It’s two separate tracks of history almost, obviously interconnected, but either one of them by themselves would be huge, monumental, earth-shattering history.

Colored though it was by his broadcast’s partisan slant, Olbermann’s firm distinction between the dual racial and ideological symbolisms of Obama’s victory made for smart commentary on a night when many commentators turned to safe iterations of the moment’s historic nature.

Colin Powell’s interview with CNN this morning was in some ways the bridge between the two modes of analysis; between the “First African-American in Highest U.S. Office” and the “Racial Barrier Falls” headlines; between announcing history made and imbuing that announcement with some greater meaning (however roughly, crudely, or simply). Powell’s comments, predictable in many ways, nonetheless fluctuated between quiet jubilation and resistance to the Big Day For Race In America narrative. After admitting that he and his family cried upon hearing the news, Powell said: “President-elect Obama didn’t put himself forward as an African American president. He put himself forward as an American who happened to be black… That ought to come after the title.”

“You have to take enormous pride in the fact that we were able to do this,” he continued. And then, from someone who understands the significance of symbolism, he offered a reminder that barriers are as real as they are symbolic: “Right now it’s economics. The American people voted in this election to have something done about our economic situation.”

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