Author Archives: Stephen Tall

The Telegraph has the rather surprising story of Jacob Rigg’s something-to-tell-the-grandkids-about claim to fame:

The US President-elect’s speech to hundreds of thousands of supporters in Chicago on Tuesday was one of the most widely-watched and repeated political addresses in recent history.

It was also partly written in a flat in Notting Hill, West London.

Parts of the speech were crafted by Jacob Rigg, a volunteer advisor to the Obama campaign.

Mr Rigg works for The Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, which lobbies and advises on tax issues, including the rules that apply to non-domiciled foreigners living in the UK.

He also

…

Well, the outcome’s in no doubt, but the actual result is – which means we can’t yet officially announce a winner of our Lib Dem Voice Presidential Prediction competition.

As it stands, we’re still pending the official confirmation of who has gained North Carolina’s 15 electoral college votes. At the moment, it’s narrowly in the Obama fold, in which case the final electoral college vote will be: Obama 364, McCain 174.

If that’s eventually confirmed it will mean Joe (the) Taylor, Lib Dem blogger and councillor, and US electoral expert, will have duly triumphed, with an on-the-nose prediction. In which case, we won’t need to use our tie-breaker, the popular vote, where the current projection is Obama 52%, McCain 46%.

In fact a number of competition entrants came pretty damn close in the end. Here they are in descending order of closeness (assuming that North Carolina vote holds true for Obama):

If you weren’t up to watch it live at 5am GMT (as the hard-core of LDV readers were), then do take 18 minutes out of your day today to watch President-elect Obama’s acceptance speech, delivered shortly after his stunning election victory over Senator John McCain was confirmed.

The rhetoric is, as ever, dazzlingly revivalist – in many ways I’m an Obama-sceptic, but I defy anyone not to be bestirred by his words. Note, too, the perfect poise of this guy; the immense calm, stillness and assurance he projects. Who knows what kind of President he will make? But it’s hard to imagine a more impressive Presidential candidate.

Well, who imagined we could ever use that headline? No matter how many times it’s repeated – to the point the cliche becomes stale – this is a truly historic moment, both for President-elect Barack Obama, and for the American people. We at Lib Dem Voice salute you.

If you want to re-live the night through the LDV live-blog, click here. And if you want to see what folk were prepared to predict the result would be before the election, then click here.

Feel free to continue the morning-after-the-night-before discussions here…