America turns the page
THE ELECTION of Barack Obama as America's 44th president ushers in not just a new and decisively different direction for the United States, but also a new kind of politics: more decentralized, entrepreneurial, and grassroots, and with a reconfigured electoral map that lays waste to old notions of red states and blue. On this morning, as Obama said in his victory speech, "a new dawn of American leadership is at hand."
Because of the kind of campaign he ran - contesting many of the 50 states, deep into traditionally Republican territory - and the policies he espoused, Obama holds the promise of at last moving the nation beyond the hardened poles that have bedeviled the national discourse since the late 1960s.
The cultural shorthand that was employed to such devastating effect in 2004 - latte-sippers vs. Joe Sixpack; wind-surfing vs. NASCAR - failed to take hold. Obama, 47, saw something that another generation, one that dominated politics for the past 20 years, had missed. Indeed it seemed that the Republican candidate, John McCain, was more mired in the 1960s, with his fixation on Vietnam-era radicals and not being "dishonored and defeated" in a foreign war.
This election was about big things - a global economic meltdown, a massive government intervention in the financial markets, a deeply unpopular war. These factors, too, made the petty attacks against Obama far less salient.
The long Democratic primary fight against Hillary Clinton for the party's nomination helped Obama, not just by making him a stronger candidate, but by exciting parts of the country that have been afterthoughts in past presidential years: the late-voting states such as North Carolina or Indiana, many of them traditionally "red," where Democratic Party registration soared.
Turnout records fell. Voters, buoyed by a sense of the moment, brought their children with them to the polls, waiting for hours, and more than a few wept.
The man who will be the first African-American president also was the first Democrat to win Virginia since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He will be the first Northern Democrat elected since John F. Kennedy. Words like "historic" and "transformative" hardly begin to cover it.
The headiness of Obama's victory will very soon give way to the sobering tasks facing the next administration. America's wrecked economy and its estrangement from the world need immediate attention. The country desperately needs a leader who can cross cultural and generational divides. Last night, Americans cast their hopes that the skinny young man with the strange name is the one. 