It gave a person a start when, at close to 2 A.M. on Election Night, Sasha and Malia Obama walked across the stage in Chicago with their mother and father. Four years ago, when Barack Obama was first elected President, the girls were small children—they are still just eleven and fourteen—and now Malia is about as tall as her mother. If the quarrels and deliberations associated with politics are, as Obama said in his speech, “a mark of our liberty,” then his daughters were a mark of the passage of time. Mitt Romney had tried to win the election, in part, by making people a little ashamed of how they’d felt back in 2008—that their hopes had gone bad, like adult children living in rooms and lives too small for them with, as Paul Ryan, his running mate, put it, fading Obama posters on the wall; or, at best, that they’d taken part in a noble failure. And yet some things hadn’t faded, it turned out. Obama won, and will still be the President when Malia is old enough to vote for his successor.

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The hour was so late because Mitt Romney had taken so long to concede that he had lost. The interval included some transfixingly odd moments on Fox News, involving Karl Rove and reports that the Romney campaign might want to contest just about everything; then they realized that there was nothing practical to contest. Romney came out onstage alone. He said that his wife would have been a wonderful First Lady, that he would pray for Obama and his family, and that he believed in America. For this, he was praised afterward in the effusive way a person often is when others are done with him. He sounded like a man who had no idea why he’d lost.

One reason had to do with women, and with the Republican Party’s failure to address their concerns. This was a campaign in which Romney attempted to pass off an extreme position on abortion—a ban that would leave exceptions only when a woman was the victim of rape or incest, or if her life was at stake—as a moderate one. The slim logic was that he was not as extreme as Senate candidate Todd Akin, of Missouri, who talked about the pregnancy-preventing powers of “legitimate rape” while running against a woman he said wasn’t “ladylike”; or Richard Mourdock, of Indiana, who ruminated, in a debate, about God’s plan for women who became pregnant as a result of rape; or his own running mate, Paul Ryan, who only wanted to permit abortions if it was very clear that the woman would otherwise die. The Romney team was put in the position of trying to use the unscientific illusions of some of its more eccentric nominees as camouflage for the actual policies of its standard bearers. Either way, it was all too conspicuous. Both Akin and Mourdock lost badly.

But Ann Romney and her husband were correct when they said, by way of dismissing the issue of reproductive rights, that women had other things to worry about, including issues of jobs and taxes. Romney just wasn’t able to persuade women that his economic plans, at this fiscal-cliff moment, were the right ones for them as wage-earners, as securers of health insurance for children and health aides for elderly relatives, as illusion-free members of the forty-seven per cent. These issues are intertwined, and not only because women’s health is also an economic issue. When you are insulted, when you are told that endless conversations about liberty do not include control of your own body, when it becomes clear that a politician views the crisis of a woman who has just been raped as an abstraction, you begin to think about sympathy, and its limits. And you begin to think about trust.

Obama spoke to a very different impulse in his victory speech, which was better than anything we’ve heard from him for a long while. He finally brought up climate change. He spoke about an America “open to the dreams of an immigrant’s daughter who studies in our schools and pledges to our flag.” He used the word “love” a half dozen times, both when he spoke about the responsibilities that come with freedom—“And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism”—and when he said, “Michelle, I have never loved you more.” Around the time their daughters were small, there was also an idea that Michelle Obama might be divisive—the angry black woman out of place in the White House. That has been thoroughly dispelled. Michelle Obama’s first term was undoubtedly a success.

“We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions,” Obama said, in what may have been the speech’s most direct retort to Mitt Romney. He said that our wealth didn’t make us rich, though we are wealthy: “What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth…. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight.” Sasha and Malia are part of a generation for whom respect for gay marriage is not an act of rebellion, but a homily—a change reflected in four different ballot initiatives.

Around the time that Obama spoke, Tammy Baldwin, of Wisconsin, defeated Tommy Thompson to become America’s first openly gay senator; and a woman in Hawaii named Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, became the first Hindu to be elected to Congress. These results speak to the problem of “demographics”—a word that, on Wednesday morning, was repeated so often by distraught Republicans as to form a single unbroken whine. But what does it mean, beyond the observation that in America there are people who are black, Hispanic, gay or lesbian, or are women—not exactly an obscure minority—or who are simply young? That is not a dilemma; that is a matter of children getting older. And they do.

Photograph by Darcy Padilla/Agence VU.