How Obama Rewrote the Book

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Still, as of mid-September, McCain, with Palin at his side, had closed the gender gap, ignited his base, delighted Rush Limbaugh and seemed to be having fun for the first time in ages. He hammered the point that he was the only one who had been tested in a crisis. It was working great — until he was tested in a crisis. The assumption all year was that if the Furies delivered turmoil to the doorstep of this election, the country would retreat to the safe choice and not risk a rookie. It was Obama's triumph that the financial crisis that might have buried him actually raised him up, let voters judge his judgment in real time, the 3 a.m. phone call that came night after night. It gave him, over the course of three weeks and three debates, a stage for statesmanship that decades of Senate debate could never have offered.

On the day Lehman Brothers evaporated, McCain was running 2 points ahead. In September, when the Wall Street Journal asked people who was better on taxes, McCain beat Obama, 41% to 37%. Over the next month, there was an 18-point swing, until Obama prevailed on taxes, 48% to 34%. The Obama campaign never missed a chance to replay McCain's quotes about the fundamentals of the economy being strong or that he was "fundamentally a deregulator" at a time when regulation was fundamentally overdue. The moment McCain tried to seize the moment, suspend the campaign and ride back to Washington to rescue the global financial system only to be shut down by his own party, he handed Obama a weapon almost as powerful as the crisis itself. Times were suddenly scary — and McCain was "erratic," "impulsive," reckless. He fell into a trap he couldn't get out of for weeks: any attempt to do something dramatic and different just dug the hole deeper. Every time McCain took a swing, as his cheering section demanded he do, those undecided-voter dial meters plunged. Six in 10 voters said McCain was spending more time attacking Obama than explaining his own positions, at a moment of crisis when people care what those positions were.

Over the course of three debates right in the heat of the crisis, voters got to take the measure of the men directly — no stadium crowds, no stunts, no speechwriters to save them. They were being told that Obama was a dangerous radical who hung out with terrorists. Simply by seeming sober and sensible, he both reassured voters and diminished McCain, whose attacks suddenly seemed disingenuous. A New York Times survey found that people who changed their views on Obama were twice as likely to say they had grown more favorable, not less; those who now saw McCain differently were three times as likely to say their view had worsened than had improved. And that was after the markets had shed a couple of trillion dollars. By mid-October, only 1 in 3 voters thought McCain would bring the country a real change in direction. He never got close again.

Eventually Obama's opponents moved past accusing him of celebrity and socialism to charging his family with witchcraft and warning that his election would bring on the End of Days, when Christianity would be criminalized and "God could take his hand of protection off of America," as Gary Bauer, who once ran for President himself, put it. Obama, meanwhile, used his immense financial advantage to run a half-hour prime-time ad that told his story, made his case — and never once mentioned McCain.

By the end, some lessons were already clear. Obama's sheer brute financial force, outspending McCain nearly 2 to 1, guarantees that the way we pay for our politics will never be the same — and money and power tend to flow as one. A new generation of voters is about to show us whether they dropped in to visit or intend to stay. The Democrats in Congress were handed greater power despite abiding unpopularity; we'll now see whether they understand that it's a loan, not a reward. And the repudiation of President Bush and his allies ensures that the conservative movement will have to sit in a circle, hold hands, light some incense and figure out what its members really believe in when it comes to putting their principles into practice. The legacy of a President who vastly expanded the national debt, the size of government and its reach into what was once called private enterprise is likely to haunt his party for a generation to come.

The Road Ahead
Modern history is a cautionary tale of new Presidents who overreach and emboldened lawmakers careless with power. In her unsuccessful fight to hold her North Carolina Senate seat, Elizabeth Dole ran an ad predicting that "these liberals want complete control of government, in a time of crisis. All branches of government. No checks and balances. No debate. No independence." If Democrats like her opponent win, she warned, "they get a blank check." The rumbling started before the votes even came in: there was House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank talking about cutting military spending 25% and taxing "a lot of very rich people out there." Amnesty International set a deadline for closing Gitmo; the ACLU wants a complete review of watch lists within 100 days.

Whose side will Obama be on? The old Ted Kennedy liberals he re-inspired, the Blue Dog Democrats he courted, the new arrivals from purple and even red districts whose shelf life depends on a centrist agenda? He has talked about the need to fix entitlements, but try to pin him down on the Audacity of How, and he vanished in a foam of contingency. He has promised to end the war in Iraq responsibly, but the tension between end and responsibility tightens now. He voted for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but there are bound to be far more claims on that pot than there is money available in it, and the three months between now and Inauguration Day are not likely to be kind to the new kid. Obama has been cautious at every turn not to commit himself to too many details. But he has made a lot of promises of his own. Clinton, for one, has no illusions about what lies ahead. "I remember very well, right after Bill was elected, we found out that the budget deficit was twice as big as had been advertised," she told TIME's Karen Tumulty. "I think that we're going to find a lot of snakes under the rocks when we start picking them up, looking at this Administration." Obama has had teams of people already working closely with the Treasury Department and the Pentagon in the event of a victory. They have submitted countless names to the FBI to be sure that they are packing security clearances as soon as possible. McCain mocked the presumption of Obama's "measuring the drapes," but Obama's preparations for a transition reflected the fact that the rest of the world isn't going to wait until Jan. 20 to find out what he thinks. At a time like this, there's probably no such thing as being overprepared.

His vow to bring people together will mean nothing if he just does what's already easy. He has to find real Republicans to put in real Cabinet positions, not just Transportation. He needs to use his power in ways that make both parties equally unhappy, to dust off the weighty words we need to hear, not just the uplifting ones — like austerity, sacrifice, duty to the children we keep borrowing from. The national debt passed $10 trillion in September; in the next month, we added $500 billion to it — the fastest, deepest plunge into red ink in more than 50 years. Will Obama end the double standard between how Washington works and how everyplace else does, the loopholes it defends, the common sense it defies?

"This victory alone is not the change we seek," he challenged the nation on Tuesday night. "It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

We get the leaders we deserve. And if we lift them up and then cut them off, refuse to follow unless they are taking us to Disneyland, then no President, however eloquent, however historic his mandate or piercing his sense of what needs to be done, can take us where we refuse to go. This did not all end on Election Day, Obama said again and again as he talked about the possibility of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And so, we are merely at the end of the beginning.

— With reporting by Laura Fitzpatrick / New York

See pictures of the world reacting to Obama's win.

See pictures of Barack Obama's victory celebration in Chicago.