10 biggest national stories of 2008
Hindsight is always 20/20 when it comes to judging the historical significance of a single year, but there is little doubt that 2008 will be viewed as groundbreaking and earth-shattering a year in our nation’s history as any in recent memory. Here are the top 10 national and statewide stories of the year:
1. Barack Obama becomes the first African- American to win the White House
It is undeniable that Nov. 4, 2008 will be remembered as a turning point in our nation’s history. On that night, Barack Hussein Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, took the stage before nearly a quartermillion people jammed into Grant Park in Chicago after being elected the 44 th president of the United States.
“If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where anything is possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama declared to thousands of cheering supporters.
He reiterated his message of national unity that night — the same message he communicated so eloquently during his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Four years after bursting on the national political landscape, Obama defeated Republican rival John McCain, 72, with relative ease by winning crucial swing states Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina. “Change has come to America,” Obama said in his victory speech. Obama’s stunning victory could be attributed in large part to his outstanding grassroots organization. In North Carolina, Obama defeated McCain by 14,177 votes, or about three-tenths of a percent.
2. Nation falls into deep recession
The economic news got worse and worse throughout 2008. In March, there was the overnight collapse of Wall Street titan Bear Stearns, in what proved to be the first domino to fall in what would become a meltdown of the global financial markets. Then, the Federal Reserve began emergency lending to investment banks that it didn’t regulate, later expanding to a wider range of Wall Street players. In a failed bid to arrest declining home prices, the Fed also began buying the complex mortgage bonds that investors didn’t want. That seismic event was followed by July’s record oil prices of $147 a barrel, which meant consumers paying more than $4 a gallon. Recordhigh gas prices helped spark inflation and send food and commodities prices spiraling upward worldwide. In September, the government seized the assets of mortgage charged with felonies.
Presidential attention
Presidential
candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton visited the Triad numerous
times during their pitched battle for the Democratic nomination, and
the former President Bill Clinton worked the B-level circuit in support
of his wife. Obama pulled out a convincing win in Guilford and Forsyth
counties and across the Triad that proved to be the decisive blow from
which Clinton never recovered.
Obama’s primary victory in North Carolina on the strength of enthusiastic support from a coalition of college students, African Americans and wealthy white liberals foreshadowed his general election triumph over Republican nominee John McCain, which relied on precisely the same dynamics.
Although Obama’s landslide victory made North Carolina’s electoral votes unnecessary, the candidate demonstrated just how important he considered the state when he appeared in Greensboro the day after his first presidential debate.
Greensboro police controversies
James Coman, special prosecutor for the state of North Carolina,
testified as a witness in Guilford County Superior Court on June 11
that writer Jerry Bledsoe told him that the motivation behind his “Cops
In Black and White” series in The Rhinoceros Times was to restore
former Greensboro police Chief David Wray’s good name, get City Manager
Mitchell Johnson fired and establish that political correctness was the order of the day in city government.
Meanwhile
the performance of the Greensboro Police Department became increasingly
politicized, as critics of Johnson’s handling of Wray’s exit suggested
that the department was bungling major cases and allowing crime to get
out of hand. Carroll Buracker & Associates, a consultant, delivered
a report on the department in early July that contradicted those
assumptions. The report concluded that the department holds an enviable
record of solving crimes, and the city’s per-capita crime rate has
declined in the past decade-plus. The report also said the department
needed to improve its process for promoting in the command ranks, which
they found to be “seriously flawed by being far too ambiguous and
subjective.”
The Buracker report also questioned some of the
department’s law enforcement priorities, suggesting that the gang unit
be cut in half and officers be reallocated to a new domestic violence
unit. The consultants could find no objective basis for the formation
of the gang unit beyond a finding by the department that “commercial
robberies are unusually high” — contradicted by an actual decline in
commercial robberies from 2006 to 2007 — and “there are more reported
incidents of youth violence than ever before, and our schools have been
negatively impacted by the activities related to youth gangs.”
:
Kay Hagan, a state lawmaker from Greensboro, celebrates her election to the US Senate on Nov. 4. (photo by Jordan Green)
