By Joseph Williams, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- Lower 16th Street, near Blair House, resembles a street party.

Vendors are selling fried chicken wings, posters, T-shirts, and rubber Obama "Baller bracelets" ("Two for five dollars!")

In yet another sign of the magnitude of the occasion, competing newspaper vendors from the Washington Post and the New York Times are hawking special-editions on the corner of Connecticut and L streets, harkening back to events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor and V-J Day.

But the vendors, all young African-American men wearing knit watch caps emblazoned with their respective papers, were proudly putting their own cultural twist, rapping and chanting about the first black president to draw attention from the surging crowds of passers-by.

"It's Obama Time!" one shouted.

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