Obama Wins.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama)

At the Times, it is house style to refer to a successful Presidential nominee by his full name in the lead of the main story the morning after the election. He may be Bill or Jimmy on his campaign posters, but in the newspaper of record on that one momentous occasion he is William Jefferson or James Earl, Jr. So say it loud and say it proud: Barack Hussein Obama, President-elect of the United States. Of the United States of America, as he himself liked to say on the stump--always, it seemed, with a touch of awe at the grandeur and improbability of it all.

Barack Hussein Obama: last week, sixty-five million Americans turned a liability--a moniker so politically inflammatory that the full recitation of it was considered foul play--into a global diplomatic asset, a symbol of the resurgence of America's ability to astonish and inspire. In the Convention keynote speech that made him instantly famous four years ago, Obama called himself "a skinny kid with a funny name." Funny? Not really. "Millard Fillmore"--now, that's funny. The Times contented itself with referring to the candidate's "unusual name." Unusual? Unusual would be, say, "Dwight D. Eisenhower." Ten weeks from now, the President of the United States will be a person whose first name is a Swahili word derived from the Arabic (it means "blessing"), whose middle name is that not only of a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad but also of the original target of an ongoing American war, and whose last name rhymes nicely with "Osama." That's not a name, it's a catastrophe, at least in American politics. Or ought to have been.

Yet Barack Obama won, and won big. Democrats have now achieved pluralities in four of the last five Presidential elections. But Obama's popular vote was an outright majority--a little more than fifty-two per cent, at the latest reckoning--and the largest share for a nominee of his party since Lyndon Johnson's in 1964. Obama made significant gains compared with John Kerry, four years ago, in nearly every category that exit polls record: black folks but also white folks; liberals but also conservatives; women but also men. His gains were especially striking among Latinos, the very poor and the very well-off, Catholics and the unchurched, and the two groups most likely to be concerned about the future--young people and the parents of children living at home. And although the Obama wave does not seem to have brought with it a filibuster-proof Senate, it did sweep into office enough new members of both houses of Congress to offer him the hope of a governing legislative majority.

This election was so extraordinary in so many ways that its meaning will take many years to play out and many more to be understood. But there is already the feel of the beginning of a new era. As in 1932 and 1980, a crisis in the economy opened the way for the rejection of a reigning approach to government and the forging of a new one. Emphatically, comprehensively, the public has turned against conservatism at home and neoconservatism abroad. The faith that unfettered markets and minimal taxes on the rich will solve every domestic problem, and that unilateral arrogance and American ...