President-Elect Obama

At the Marriott Hotel in Glen Allen, Va., a despondent crowd watched Fox News call Pennsylvania and then Ohio for Sen. Barack Obama. But it wasn't until Fox News called Virginia for Obama at around 10:45 p.m.—with 91 percent of precincts reporting and just 50,000 votes separating the candidates—that the remaining two dozen or so people at the state Republican Party's "victory" celebration expressed the full extent of their disappointment. "I'm devastated," said Carl Woo, a 54-year-old CPA from Richmond. Woo's friend, a furniture-store owner named Ed Barden, tried to reassure him. "It's not over yet," Barden said. "But the patient's on life support," a dejected Woo replied.

Obama succeeded not only because of discontent with the Bush administration and the GOP over issues such as the Iraq War and the economy, but because he managed to broaden the Democratic Party's appeal nationally. In winning Florida, for instance—which went to the Republicans in the last two elections—Obama took 55 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to exit polls, says Fernand Amandi of Bendixen & Associates, Obama's Hispanic polling firm. That marks the first time in memory that a Democrat has carried the state's Latino vote. Obama also managed to win states that no Democrat had managed to take in decades, like Virginia.

More than any previous president, Obama's background is a dramatic mix of races and cultures; every family gathering is "like a meeting of the United Nations," he has joked. Born in Hawaii, Obama spent most of his youth there and in Indonesia and moved to the U.S. mainland only as a young man. Yet Obama sees himself as no less a true-blue American for all that. His beloved mother, Ann, wanted him to be "a citizen of the world," Obama once told NEWSWEEK, but he said that "somehow didn't feel right for me. I wanted to be rooted in an American city and an American context."

He is also, to a degree that is unusual, rooted in the nation's North and Midwest, regions that have been somewhat eclipsed after a generation in which the nation's demographics have favored Southern and Western candidates. Obama is the first Northern Democrat to take the White House since John F. Kennedy in 1960. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush "has for the moment played itself out," says Dallek. And the era of Barack Obama has begun.

© 2008