Obama to supporters: 'This is your victory'

CHICAGO -- Barack Obama, who introduced himself to the nation four years ago as "a skinny kid with a funny name," celebrated his election Tuesday night as the first African American president before a multiracial crowd of 125,000 on the shore of Lake Michigan.

"It belongs to you," Obama told his supporters. "This is your victory."

For Obama, a first-term senator with family connections that span the globe from Kenya to Kansas, it was the dizzying conclusion to an unlikely odyssey that began in the snow of February 2007, when he announced his candidacy near the Illinois statehouse where Abraham Lincoln, the nation's 16th president, served as a legislator.

"I was never the likeliest candidate," Obama said Tuesday.

Moments before he spoke, Obama received congratulatory phone calls from John McCain, the Republican senator he beat, and from President Bush.

Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman, said the Democratic president-elect thanked McCain for his "graciousness" and a campaign conducted with "class and honor" and asked his former rival to work with him. "I need your help. You're a leader on so many important issues," Obama told McCain.

Bush extended an invitation for Obama and his family to visit the White House soon and promised to smooth the transition, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

"You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life," the president told his soon-to-be successor. "Congratulations and go enjoy yourself."

A virtually unknown state legislator when he spoke to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama galvanized viewers by turning his own struggle to come to grips with his biracial identity into a metaphor for the nation's need to rise above its divisions.

He echoed that theme again in his election night speech, calling on Americans to rise above "the partisan pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics."

"In this country, we rise or fall as one nation," Obama said.

As his hard-fought campaign came to a close, even he seemed to be having trouble grasping the history he was about to make, urging supporters not to let up their efforts — "not for one minute, not for one second" — in the closing hours of the election.