There’s an opportunity here, as we hit the reset button, for Obama to begin a second term by lavishing his attention on areas of general bipartisan agreement or for Romney to begin a first term with a focus on that same territory. It exists. Both parties acknowledge the need for tax reform and agree that we have to figure out a way to keep the spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in check, especially as the population ages. Both parties accept that a competitive America is an educated America, and would like to see the country make strides on that front.

Image Frank Bruni Credit... Earl Wilson/The New York Times

So before we surrender to our worst fears about Tuesday’s winner or re-litigate our complaints — many warranted, some overblown — against him, shouldn’t we first adopt a posture of support and see if he steps forward as a consensus-building problem solver rather than a hostage to special interests and partisan passions? Don’t we owe that to him, and even more to ourselves?

Already I can hear the wailing. I can foresee my in-box: Romney is a soulless opportunist who bought and lied his way into office and will capitulate to the immovable extremists in his party, so let’s eschew rose-colored glasses and hasten to our battle stations. Obama is a socialist in sheep’s clothing, and with no third term to worry about, he’ll ditch the fleecy threads and pounce.

There’s a lot of that all-good, all-bad, Manichaean thinking out there, abetted by the altered news-media landscape, in which the id of Twitter eclipses the superego of traditional journalism; subjective riffs outnumber objective reports; and the blogosphere and cable-news landscape are more heavily forested on the right and the left than in the middle, so sadly denuded.

There’s a corrosive itch to see political opponents not merely as wrongheaded but as evil. And there’s an impulse to question their very legitimacy. It was nourished by the 2000 election, in which Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush nabbed the presidency, with a crucial assist from the Supreme Court. And it flowered in the claims — still audible on the loonier fringes of the right, by which I mean Trump Tower — that Obama’s very birthplace and eligibility for the presidency are in question.