More than 100,000 euphoric people danced and wept in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday night as a Democratic victory swept across the electoral map of the United States. It transformed Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, into the nation’s first African-American president-elect. Across the U.S., voters had waited in long lines, some for five hours or more, for the chance to have their say in the conclusion to the longest and most expensive presidential contest in history. Toddlers were lifted to touch voting screens on behalf of parents; Americans who had lived through racial segregation left the polls weeping, saying they had not thought they’d live to see the day.
Obama, the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, was a mere state senator not yet elected to the United States Senate when he gave an electrifying speech, calling for national unity, at the 2004 Democratic convention. Then, in four short years, he went on to redefine what was possible in American politics. In a bitter and drawn-out primary contest, he bested a pillar of the Democratic establishment, Hillary Rodham Clinton, with his superior organization and unwavering message of change. He prevailed in an ugly presidential race against Arizona Senator John McCain, in which he was called a socialist and a secret Muslim, accused of palling around with terrorists, and saw the validity of his American citizenship baselessly challenged. Despite it all, he picked up states that eluded the Democrats in 2004, including Florida, Ohio and Virginia, in the process earning a national mandate for his presidency.
The rise of the 47-year-old lawyer was the story of a once-in-a-generation political talent. But it was also the reawakening of the Democratic party, in a country where Republicans had set the agenda since taking over Congress in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. It took a financial crisis on Wall Street to finally give Obama a solid lead in the polls by mid-September. But even then, Democrats couldn’t quite believe it. Would voters really select the black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth? They did, in droves. While some Americans said they would never vote for a black man, many expressed their desire not only for “change” from the era of George W. Bush, but also to be a “part of history.”
When he stepped onto the stage in Grant Park on Tuesday night to give his acceptance speech, Obama spoke in epic terms about his aspirations for his presidency. “This is our moment,” he said. “This is our time—to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth—that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: ‘Yes we can.’ ”
But the president-elect leavened the euphoria with words of caution. “The road ahead will be long,” Obama said. “Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America—I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you—we as a people will get there.”
It will take more than hope. When Obama places his hand on a Bible on Jan. 20 and takes the oath of office as the 44th president of the United States, he will face the biggest economic quagmire since Franklin Delano Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in the midst of the Great Depression. By Inauguration Day, more jobs will be lost, the government deficit will still be soaring and revenues plummeting. The recession, of unknown depth and duration, will be well under way by the time Obama moves into the Oval Office. But even Roosevelt wasn’t facing a war in his first day in on the job, let alone two—the future of Iraq hangs by a thread while the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse. “The events of the last month suggest that the challenges the next president will face are comparable to other emergencies in American history like the Civil War and the Great Depression,” says Sidney Milkis, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and author of several books on the presidency.
It is not unthinkable that Obama’s moment of triumph could be the start of his undoing. Few presidents have entered office not only facing so many problems, but also such sky-high expectations—from fixing the economy, ending the wars and restoring America’s image abroad, to achieving historic racial reconciliation and transforming the “culture of Washington.” Some of his boosters speak in almost Biblical terms about his ability to offer “healing,” and even “rebirth.” Has a load so great ever been placed on what are, at the end of the day, elegant but so very inexperienced shoulders? Could the Obama presidency be doomed to failure before it even begins?
Presidential history offers a stark cautionary tale. Martin Van Buren, a well-heeled Democrat from New York state, became the eighth American president in March 1837. He’d barely started his job when a financial bubble, fuelled by the policies of his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, burst in a spectacular fashion, triggering a crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1837. Almost half of the banks in the U.S. failed. Land prices collapsed. A five-year depression and massive unemployment followed. So many people went bankrupt that a special law had to be passed to forgive their debts because there were not enough places for all the debtors in jail. The government went into sharp deficit. The national debt grew. Van Buren—mocked by his rivals as “Martin Van Ruin”—never had a chance. He was voted out after one undistinguished term.
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