Kansas City, Kansas - As Presidential candidate John McCain conceded victory to his rival Barack Obama Tuesday night, voters in Kansas City, Kansas, rooted for the Illinois Senator with Kansas roots.

While Obama was born and reared in Hawaii, his mother and maternal grandparents, who help raise him in the absence of his Kenyan father, had deep roots in Kansas, an agricultural, heavily rural state on the Great Plains - the geographic and figurative middle of America.

Kansas, long a conservative stronghold,

Eighteen-year-old Kansas City native Billy Hunter cheered with his friends outside a downtown Pizza Hut as McCain finished his speech.

"It's about time for a change," said Hunter, who is black. "I've been telling a lot of people to get out and vote. I know my parents have been waiting for this for a long time. It feels good to be a part of this historical moment."

Being part of a historical moment was important also to Matt Mayfield, 32, a Kansas native, who said his Irish-Catholic great- grandfather was born on an immigrant ship from Ireland.

"The election of Obama speaks to a lot of people like us Irish Catholics. He is like Kennedy, who my grandmother said was one of the greats, like Sinatra," Mayfield said.

"I'm pretty excited. I was born in 1976. One of the biggest historical events in my life was 9/11 - a point in history when I knew the world had changed. This is the second big historical event in my life, and this was a good, positive one."

Just finished with a shift as the executive sous chef at the Aladdin Hotel in Kansas City, Ben Pruett said that he voted for Obama, whom he saw as representing the kind of change that the United States needs now.

"I'm ecstatic," Pruett said, still wearing his chef's uniform as he celebrated downtown and turned to catch Obama's acceptance speech on television. "I knew from day one that Obama was the type of person we needed to lead our country. He has the attitude and the ideology we need." (dpa)