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Nov. 5, 2008 | It took America 220 years to go from George Washington, a fourth-generation Virginian, to Hawaiian-born Barack Obama, the 47-year-old son of Kenya and Kansas -- and the newly elected 44th president of the United States. In just 11 weeks, Obama will place his hand on a Bible and swear to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." No president since John Kennedy or Harry Truman will come into office facing graver crises. Such is George W. Bush's sad-eyed legacy to his successor -- from the Wall Street meltdown to an over-stretched military fighting debilitating wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Tuesday night was a time of joy for Democrats and independents -- a glorious affirmation of America's capacity for rebirth as Obama rolled to a unequivocal victory over John McCain. With three states still undecided, Obama was guaranteed at least 349 electoral votes, winning a minimum of eight states carried by Bush in 2004 (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico). The Democrats also picked up a minimum of five Senate seats, giving them a healthy (if not quite filibuster-proof) majority along with comfortable control of the House of Representatives.

In his outdoor victory speech before a rapturous crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, Obama erased the memory of Joe the Plumber by invoking a more powerful symbol of America: 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, a black woman who Tuesday went to the polls in Atlanta. Employing his rhetorical power that can uplift and instruct, Obama used her life to summon up more than a century of individual Americans triumphing over economic adversity, world wars and the legacy of segregation. At each crossroads of this national journey, Obama repeated his campaign's refrain, "Yes we can."

McCain in a gracious concession speech returned to the bipartisanship that has often marked his Senate career, doing away with the harsh tenor of the closing weeks of the campaign that he waged along with Sarah Palin. The Arizona senator expressed the hope that the nation "would find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences." While McCain seems poised personally to practice the politics of the olive branch, his defeat may have moved the GOP further to the right, by limiting its base on both the electoral map and in the Congress to the Deep South, the rural Midwest and the under-populated Rocky Mountain states.

Tuesday was the night that the 1960s -- the divisive decade that defined American politics for 40 years -- finally died. Obama first won his party's nomination by defeating Hillary Clinton, the emblematic liberal baby boomer, in the primaries. And on Tuesday night he defeated McCain, who owes his political career to his suffering and bravery as a POW in Vietnam. The raucous Obama victory rally in Grant Park was the capstone of Democratic strength through unity. The riotous antiwar rallies in Grant Park during the 1968 Convention and the brutality of the police truncheons accentuated the cultural fault lines in the Democratic Party that contributed to 28 years of GOP control of the White House, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush.

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