Four years ago, after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, Times Square was a mob scene like you only see on New Year's Eve.
Taxis driven by mostly men from other countries circled the square, honking and waving their hands, while people everywhere chanted 'Yes we can'. There was a palpable sense of relief, of something awful finally being over, and something truly historic beginning. Obama was, in his campaign's words, 'the change we can believe in'.
Today, the euphoria has passed. As inspirational and visionary as Obama has appeared internationally, he's struggled in the States against not only a manically negative Republican opposition with no interest in working together, but his own willingness to sit back far too long on important issues. His poor performance in the first debate came as a surprise to many, but it was consistent with the odd passivity from which he sometimes suffers.
When it came down to deciding between giving Obama four more years and electing former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, however, the American people have clearly supported the President, and in a much more emphatic way than most had predicted.
Almost from the moment results started coming in, Obama was ahead in the key states. He won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (home of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan) far earlier than expected. So, too, Ohio and Florida began trending his way early. He swept the Midwest. And he was reelected by 11:12EST, just 12 minutes later than in 2008 and a far cry from the tie some were suggesting might occur as recently as a week ago.
Some of Obama's success is a result of Hurricane Sandy. In the face of the destruction that Sandy caused, there was just no more oxygen for the soul-deadening, empty politics of the past year. And Obama, who to his great credit did not try to take political advantage of the disaster, surged in the polls from that moment on.
Romney was also trying to thread an almost impossible needle between moderates and extremists in his own party. The US as a whole skews conservative (and would so even more if we had mandatory voting), but always with a certain commonsense moderation. In driving out the moderates from the Republican party, Tea Party idealists with little interest in politics or compromise pushed away the independent voters they need to win.
They will quickly distance themselves from Romney now, but he