For two weeks, Charles P. Pierce is taking a hard-earned and well-deserved vacation. As such, we're re-promoting some of the greatest pieces he's written on President Barack Obama for Esquire over the last several years. We hope that the insights in these classic stories help contextualize other happenings you might find in your daily news feed. This afternoon, a look back on Barack Obama's victory in 2012, and a reminder of the work we as Americans all still have left in front of us. —The Editors



(Optional soundtrack to the end of the trail, and the continuation of the commonwealth...)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There is a story that they tell in Georgia politics about the first time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as this most improbable president of the United States. Shortly before the ceremony, they say, he met with John Lewis, the congressman and American hero who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama as he marched to demand the right simply to vote. The two huddled in the corner and the president-elect wrote something on Lewis's inaugural program. He walked away, and Lewis showed the program to the friends who had come with him.

"Because of you," it said. "Barack Obama."

Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I've seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just... there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does. He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who's become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily and so in the manner of an immutable physical law that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place.

Change, he talks about.

Change is the force around him when he walks into the room.

But the history that propels him is not the history that many of us learned in school. It is the underground history of the country, buried deep in the earth, over and over again, but stubbornly rising, over and over again, until it gathered all of its momentum behind him and made him the event that he was in 2008 and that he remains today. It was the history that was behind John Lewis as he walked over that bridge. It is the history that was behind him in his first campaign and then, rather late in the day, in his second campaign as well. And it is through him, maybe, that the underground history is fully integrated at last into the history of the country, that it is acknowledged at last as what it always has been — an important element to be used in the constant re-creation of our political commonwealth. He as much as said so late last night, pushing toward two in the morning.

"The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote," he said, calling, again, for the country to engage fully in "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's the principle we were founded on." That underground history that is behind him, the history that he wears so easily and wields so subtly, ultimately is a history of an ongoing demand to be included in the creative project of self-government. That was all the civil-rights movement ever was. That was what all the bloodshed and horror and death and glory were all about. It was a demand to be included in the great project simply because, if some Americans were not included in the project, it never was so great in the first place.

In terms of pure politics, he ran a great campaign. He was strongest as his voice weakened. He plays to the final whistle. He is, as Jimmy Breslin once put it about someone else, a terribly fierce fifteen-round fighter. There was something undeniably elegaic about his last round of speeches, in Florida and in Wisconsin and in Iowa, where it all started four years ago. There was a sense of the great unspooling of time and history, a sense that the beginning of the end of his moment had come upon him. But, even then, amid all the emotion, he found a very hard place from which to throw the last few punches. You know where I stand. You know what I believe. You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say. It was a combination, right-left-right, and he threw it all the way to last bell. And, in the end, it was more than enough.

Nothing became Willard Romney's campaign like the ending of it. His concession speech was simple, almost perfunctory. Best wishes to the president and his family. A nod to some staffers. A blessing bestowed upon Paul Ryan even though the zombie-eyed granny-starver brought almost nothing to the ticket. "The election is over," he said, "but our principles endure." And then he was gone, as vague and evanescent a figure as he always was, a strange and out-of-focus politician who surrounded himself with a baffling opacity that, within six months, I predict we will barely remember his campaign at all. He does not wear history as well as does the man who defeated him because history has not surrounded and powered his every public moment. That is a deficit he never could overcome.

The creative project of self-government — hard and frustrating but necessary — is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene. This whole campaign has been a referendum on that project, as though the political commonwealth were a sewer bond or a school construction bill that was submitted to the voters for their approval. That was the entire campaign. That was the issue underlying all the others. That was the fight that Romney and his party quite deliberately picked, reckoning that we had tired of all that hard and frustrating but necessary work the project involved. That was the question that was settled so definitively last night.

The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished. Elections come and go. The political commonwealth is a work in progress. We work with the tools that time and circumstance provide. As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

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ELECTION-NIGHT RESULTS ON THE POLITICS BLOG...

• THE SPEECH: Tom Junod on the Transformation in Chicago

• THE CONCESSION: Margaret Doris on Romney in Boston

• THE VIEW FROM OHIO: Mark Warren on the Worst Victory Party in America

• THE VIEW FROM TWITTER: Stephen Marche on How Math (and Obama) Won

• MASSACHUSETTS: Charles P. Pierce on How Elizabeth Warren Got Here

ELECTION DAY ON THE POLITICS BLOG, FROM EVERY SWING STATE...

• FLORIDA: Charles P. Pierce with the Voting-Rights Watchdogs

• OHIO: Mark Warren Traveling with Governor John Kasich (and with Romney)

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Margaret Doris in 5-Vote Territory (and with Romney)

• VIRGINIA: Elizabeth Sile on Voter-ID in New Blue County

• NEVADA: Jason Whithed Searching for Sheldon Adelson

• WISCONSIN: Joe Tarr on the Voter Fraud That Wasn't

• NORTH CAROLINA: Aaron Gwyn on the Independent's Indecision

• IOWA: Kyle Minor on the Easy Magic of the Battleground

• COLORADO: Sam Levin at the Last Defeat Party (and with Obama and Romney)

• ...AND PENNSYLVANIA: Isaiah Thompson on the Blue State That Would Be Red

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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