A New America

Joe Klein of Time Magazine makes the case that I've made here before about the transformational nature of this election:

Unlike many elections I've covered where the stakes were small and the differences between the candidates were minor, this was a big election, with big differences between the candidates. It was a referendum on the Reagan era. Try as he might to dissociate himself from the Bush Administration, John McCain remained a classic Reaganite. He believed in the unilateral exercise of American power overseas, with an emphasis on military might rather than diplomacy. He believed in trickle-down, supply-side, deregulatory economics: his tax plan benefited corporations and the wealthy, in the hopes that with fewer shackles, they would create more jobs. Obama was quite the opposite. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose purpose was to humanize Reaganism but not really challenge it, Obama offered a full-throated rebuttal to Clinton's notion that "the era of Big Government is over." He was a liberal, as charged. But the public was ready, after a 30-year conservative pendulum swing, for activist government.

Obama's victory creates the prospect of a new "real" America. We can't possibly know its contours yet, although I suspect the headline is that it is no longer homogeneous. It is no longer a "white" country, even though whites remain the majority. It is a place where the primacy of racial identity — and this includes the old, Jesse Jackson version of black racial identity — has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy. After eight years of misgovernance, it has lost some of its global swagger ... but also some of its arrogance. It may no longer be as dominant, economically or diplomatically, as it once was. But it is younger, more optimistic, less cynical. It is a country that retains its ability to startle the world — and in a good way, with our freedom. It is a place, finally, where the content of our President's character is more important than the color of his skin.