With a very gracious concession speech Senator John McCain cleared the path for Senator Barack  Hussein Obama to step up to the podium at Grant Park, Chicago and accept his election as the 44th president of the United States. For the 47-year old candidate from the Democratic Party this may be a bittersweet moment for he lost his beloved grandmother just a day before the historic election.

Barack H. Obama will be the fifth youngest elected president, a year older than the most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton. The youngest ever was 42-year old Theodore Roosevelt who as vice president succeeded assassinated president William McKinley.

He will also be America's first African-American president.

The battle for Sen. McCain, the Republican Party candidate, was over as soon as it became evident that battleground states Ohio and Pennsylvania had opted for Sen. Obama and the Democratic Party. No Republican has ever become president without winning Ohio and Sen. McCain's campaign did invest a lot of energy in trying to swing the 'blue' Democratic state of Pennsylvania, with its rich prize of 21 Electoral College votes, into their column. It was not to be.

Though Sen. Obama has collected far more than the required 270 Electoral College votes to usher him into the presidency, there would still be a prize worth cherishing for Senator McCain, the doughty 72-year old war veteran from the Republican Party – he nearly matched the winning candidate in popular vote, going down by only a few percentage points. This has to be an astonishing achievement even for a man so used to dealing with adverse conditions as Senator McCain.

Faced with a perfect storm of a vastly unpopular president from his party, a collapsed financial market, a badly struggling economy, an unpopular war and a youthful, extraordinarily eloquent opponent, nearly half his age, Sen. McCain had every reason to query in his concession speech – "I don't know what else we could have done?"

At his end, president-elect Barack Hussein Obama struck an appropriately realistic note in his concession speech, letting the enthusiastic thousands at Grant Park know that the "…road ahead will be long, the climb steep." 

The new president will be sworn in on 20 January 2009.