Obama will use this victory to make an argument for a détente with Republicans. Obama's grind-it-out win

CHICAGO — Barack Obama has won two presidential elections, but the second victory wasn’t in the same class as the first.

Obama avoided defeat on Tuesday — in an easier and earlier win than the all-night cliff-hanger many pundits had predicted. But this was an electoral college triumph wrested from a reluctant electorate after one of the most bitter presidential races in recent history.


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Obama will take this win — and he made an argument in a passionate victory speech for a détente with national Republicans, who have failed at their objective to make him a one-term president.

“Whether I’ve earned your vote or not, I’ve listened to you,” a hoarse but beaming Obama told thousands of supporters here at the McCormick Center, seeking to sweep aside months of brutal back-and-forth with Mitt Romney by declaring his intention to consult the former Massachusetts governor on how to move forward.

“These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty,” Obama said.

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But this year’s disputes have left quite a mark, and it remains to be seem whether his old enemies share his bury-the-hatchet mood. And his hard-won victory seemed too narrow and too rooted in the Democratic base to grant him anything close to a mandate — much less the popular support needed to break the deadlock of Washington partisanship as he promised during the campaign.

The president’s inner circle was jubilant. The numbers told a more sobering story. Early Wednesday morning, Obama was barely leading Romney in the popular vote. Even if that margin increased overnight, he’s on track for a tighter victory than the 2.4 percentage point margin George W. Bush won in 2004 and a far smaller victory than Bill Clinton’s 8-point win in 1996.

Obama lost states he won four years ago and ceded ground with many demographic groups. An ABC News exit poll of Ohio voters showed Romney leading by 10 percentage points among independent voters — starkly different than in 2008, when Obama had an 8-point edge over John McCain among independents.

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Romney had an even bigger edge with independent voters in Virginia, whom he won 53 percent to Obama’s 41 percent, according to exit polling.

What it all means for a country in need of functional two-party government is impossible to reckon until Obama meets with the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill to begin negotiations over the expiring Bush-era tax cuts.

Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told POLITICO he believed a win is a win — and that a second-term Obama administration will have plenty of clout in negotatiations because voters, even Romney supporters, simply won’t abide infinite gridlock.

“I always look back at 1996 … when everybody said President Clinton didn’t have a mandate. Nine months later we had a bipartisan budget agreement,” said Emanuel, the current mayor of Chicago. “People will respect the victory. And he will have to deal with tax reform, Medicare and Social Security and immigration reform. He can do it.”

The good news for Obama: In most states, his call for Republicans to accept tax cuts for families earning $250,000 or more proved fairly popular, according to exit polls, giving him added leverage.

Sixty percent of those surveyed nationally said they think taxes on wealthier Americans should be increased — nearly half said they approved of Obama’s tax plan. The poll also showed voters seeing Obama as determined to help the middle class and Romney as more focused on aiding the rich.

But if Obama has won a new lease on political life, he’s lost his old bully pulpit, a prime asset during his first two years in office when Emanuel helped hammer through the stimulus health reform and the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law.

Four years ago it was Obama’s aspirational message that pierced the partisan discord. This year he had a billion-dollar campaign machine to thank, one that eked out a win based on negative advertising and a formidable ground operation that matched his advisers’ predictions almost to the decimal point.

Obama’s ground operation, which one campaign insider estimated cost his team as much as $200 million, mobilized a massive turnout of Latinos and African-American voters in urban areas, making up for his loss of many white voters.

The difference between the Obama 2008 and Obama 2012 campaigns played out on the damp, chilly streets of Chicago Tuesday night.

In 2008, Obama addressed 240,000 people in Millennium Park in his hometown. Tonight the crowds in front of his Chicago headquarters and at the McCormick Center shouted with one thunderous voice around 10:15 p.m. when MSNBC called the race.

But those robust crowds, however happy, were a fraction of the size of the ones here four years ago — and to a great extent had been boiled down to his base of liberals and minority voters rather than the broader coalition of his first victory.

In the final days of the campaign, Obama’s team became increasingly confident he could grind out a narrow win, and maybe even a little more convincing one than the skin-of-teeth win pollsters expected.

“We showed ’em,” said a top Obama aide, “What happens next? I don’t know.”

Jennifer Epstein contributed to this report.