Americans endorse "change" after eight years of Bush (News Feature)

By Mike McCarthy Nov 5, 2008, 3:34 GMT

Washington - US voters took a sharp turn to the left in Tuesday's election, sending Barack Obama to the White House and strengthening Democratic control of Congress in a firm rejection of eight years of President George W Bush.

Americans embraced Obama's message of 'change' and handed him victories in all regions, including in a few states that had been Republican strongholds, as Republican nominee John McCain was unable to distance himself from the current president.

Voters chose the younger Obama over the more experienced McCain.

'McCain needed to convince Americans that Obama was the high-risk choice,' said David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. 'By the end of the campaign ... it was Obama who had seized the centre ground.'

By late Tuesday, Obama had handily captured the 270 votes needed to win in the state-by-state Electoral College. He clinched the White House by capturing states that Bush won in 2004: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Iowa and New Mexico.

The centre-left Democrats gained four seats in the US Senate with additional races still open, and they were expected to increase their already strong majority in the House of Representatives.

Obama's historic victory as the first African-American to hold the nation's highest office casts the United States in a new light globally, after Bush's policies and excesses in the war on terrorism tarnished the superpower's standing in the world.

Obama pledged to revamp the US image and to work more closely with allies. He was greeted by 200,000 enthusiastic supporters during a speech in Berlin, part of a worldwide tour in July to build his foreign-policy credentials.

Obama was the clear preference in most countries. Parties were being planned worldwide to celebrate his victory - with Kenya, his late father's native country - leading the way.

The economic woes overshadowed the vastly improved security environment in Iraq and the shrinking rate of US casualties, developments that could have otherwise tilted the outcome toward McCain.

But US voters, worried about their pocketbooks, made it clear that the country needed to move in a different direction, moving on from a conservative government and electing Obama, regarded as one of the Senate's most left-leaning members.

'Barack Obama certainly seized the opportunities created by President Bush's failures and the country's profound discontent, which only deepened after the economic crash,' Washington Post political columnist EJ Dionne wrote.

Obama and the Democrats campaigned heavily to persuade voters that a vote for McCain was a vote for more of the same, capitalizing on the faltering economy, which had eclipsed the unpopular war in Iraq as the top campaign issue.

The conflict in Iraq became fertile ground for the Democratic resurgence, foreshadowed two years ago when Republicans lost control of Congress in what was largely a referendum Bush's strategy in Iraq.

This year, despite the remarkable progress in the last 15 months under Bush's troop surge - strongly supported by McCain - Iraq had fallen to the wayside in the wake of the financial crisis that has threatened the economy.

In exit polling conducted Tuesday, 62 per cent of voters ranked the economy as the key issue, compared to 10 per cent invoking the war in Iraq and 9 per cent rating terrorism or health care highest.

Obama promised a clean break from the Bush administration by announcing early in his campaign that he would remove US combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

That position could have hurt him over the long run, but by the time he began squaring off with McCain, Iraq's importance had faded, and Americans were ready for change.