Newsstands from Seattle to New York quickly sold out of Wednesday’s papers declaring Barack Obama the nation’s first black president as some jubilant customers picked up two, three or even 30 copies as keepsakes.

The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in Obama’s hometown were among papers that restarted their printing presses to produce hundreds of thousands of additional copies across the country.

Entrepreneurs were seeking as much as $600 for the Times on eBay Wednesday.

“Own a piece of history,” Walter Elliott said as he hawked 90 copies of The Sun from a Baltimore street corner.

Some papers devoted their entire front pages to a single photo of Obama — in the San Francisco Chronicle’s case, overlaid with “OBAMA” in enormous type and a snippet from his acceptance speech: “Change has come to America.” USA Today declared, “America makes history.”

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland offered high-quality reprints of the front page for $54.95. Below the headline “Change Has Come,” a close-up of Obama covers three-fourths of the page.

Say what you want about the Internet replacing printed newspapers, but saving a copy of a Web page on a disk isn’t the same.

“What it really shows is there’s a unique value to print,” said Steve Hills, The Washington Post’s president and general manager. “It’s the ability to look at the whole thing and have a piece of history in your hands.”

A newsstand in Evanston, Ill., sold 100 copies of the Times in 10 minutes — even as the major local papers, the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, rushed to print hundreds of thousands of extra copies.

In Miami’s predominantly black Liberty City, newspapers were sold out at stores all along Martin Luther King Blvd., where residents wore Obama T-shirts and waited for buses on corners with hand-painted quotes from the civil-rights leader.

“I’ve got to put this in a frame because this is history,” said Larry Johnson as he searched for a newspaper cover of Obama.

Papers all over the country found crowds of customers outside their buildings clamoring for copies.

Many people set aside papers declaring the end of World War II and some still have them stowed away. Others have held onto papers marking the birth of a child, the completion of a marathon, the arrival of a new millennium or the news of tragedies such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Obama pastor in Conn.

Barack Obama’s pastor, a man he sought to distance himself from during the presidential campaign, is bringing his fiery rhetoric to Connecticut.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. is due in Milford tonight to debate religion, race and American history at a Milford church.

Organizers hope the forum will allow people to hear more than the sound bites that embroiled Wright and Obama in controversy this spring.

The organizer says Wright will expound upon his views of the history of the black church and black liberation theology.

Ads cost Obama $250M

Flush with a tidal wave of campaign donations, Barack Obama spent $250 million on television ads in his presidential campaign, outflanking John McCain and the Republican Party by as much as $80 million, a leading political ad-monitoring firm said.

Obama took full advantage of his decision, which McCain criticized, to become the first presidential candidate to forgo public financing for the general election campaign, despite an earlier pledge to limit himself to $84.1 million in federal funds.

Obama spent roughly $31 million on TV networks, resurrecting an option that had been “more or less given up for dead in presidential politics,” and using it for half-hour infomercials.

His ad spending smashed President Bush’s 2004 record of $188 million on TV ads, Tracey said, even though Bush began advertising for the fall campaign in March of that year, three months earlier.

Harder to measure is how much the TV ad wars affected the outcome.

Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he thinks that “the fundamentals of the election year were so favorable to Democrats that Obama would have won even if McCain had outspent him.”

2 supremacists indicted

Two white supremacists accused of plotting to kill President-elect Barack Obama and dozens of other black people were indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday in Memphis, Tenn.

Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., were arrested late last month and are in federal custody without bond.

They were charged in a seven-count indictment with possessing a sawed-off shotgun, taking firearms across state lines to commit crimes, planning to rob a licensed gun dealer and threatening a presidential candidate.

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