WASHINGTON — It was the end of a long inauguration day and an even longer presidential campaign when President Barack Obama invited 70 of his earliest supporters to his new home and its famous address, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Oprah Winfrey was there with her companion, Steadman Graham. Wynton Marsalis was blowing horn with his band.

And U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i — who had stumped for Obama a year ago in the icy Dakotas as an oddity of a Hawai'i Congressman pushing an African-American senator from Illinois — soaked up the new atmosphere of the White House.

After eight years of Republican rule, Abercrombie said yesterday, "It was nice to be back in the White House under much, much happier circumstances."

The gathering in a second-floor reception area in the White House lacked the formality of the 10 inaugural balls that Obama and his wife, Michelle, had attended hours earlier. It was even more casual than the Hawaii State Society Ball that featured hundreds of Island people dressed in ball gowns and tuxedos.

Inside the White House reception area, the man who had graduated from Punahou School in 1979 offered no speeches. Michelle even quickly excused herself and said her goodbyes after a long day under the watch of the international media.

"But after Michelle left, he (Obama) kept going," Abercrombie said yesterday after only four hours of sleep himself.

Long before, just after Obama took the presidential oath of office before a worldwide audience, Abercrombie had also attended a lunch that history will determine to be Obama's first official act as president: Presiding over a traditional inaugural luncheon that included Congressional leaders, Cabinet members, friends from Punahou, and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and her husband, Konrad Ng.

"I was very grateful to be at President Obama's first offical event and his last" of the day, Abercrombie said. "It was wonderful."

The inaugural luncheon itself became news almost immediately when U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., collapsed at his table, which was located near where Soetoro-Ng and Ng were eating.

"There was a commotion and the sound of a collapse," Abercrombie said.

Even as emergency crews from the Capitol physician's office responded, "hardly anyone knew what was going on," Abercrombie said, and Kennedy was quickly in an ambulance and on his way to a hospital..

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the 91-year West Virginia Democrat, also worried his supporters when he left the luncheon shortly after Kennedy fell ill, but Byrd returned to work at his office on Capitol Hill.

Kennedy's medical problem was the lone somber point of the day for Abercrombie, who sat on the stage as Obama raised his right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States.

Then finally — after all of the speeches and balls —- Obama took time to embrace his friends inside the White House.

There was no gloating or celebration, Abercrombie said.

For him, there was more of an overwhelming sense of relief that the Obama campaign had pulled off what it set out to do nearly two years ago.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, Abercrombie looked around the White House and said to himself, " 'Wow, this is actually happening.' That doesn't happen very often in life, that everything goes as planned. When it does, let me tell you, it's a wonderful feeling."