Even Karl Rove could only delay the inevitable for so long. At about 11:30 P.M., shortly after all the networks had called Ohio and, with it, the entire election for President Obama, the man George W. Bush used to call Turd Blossom objected, live on the air, to the Fox News decision to go along with the crowd. It was a rare public spat in the Fox/G.O.P. alliance, and, evidently, somebody in Boston was listening. Citing the possibility of a last-minute turnaround in Ohio, the Romney campaign refused for another hour or so to concede it was all over.

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Finally, just before one in the morning, a tired-looking Mittster walked to the lectern and delivered a short but gracious concession speech, in which he called upon Republicans and Democrats to “reach across the aisles to do the nation’s work.” He praised his erstwhile rival as a family man, and twice said he would be praying for him to guide the nation successfully. He thanked Paul Ryan, and said wistfully of his wife, Ann, “She would have been a wonderful First Lady.”

As Romney spoke, the figures running across the bottom of the screen showed that, with seventy-seven per cent of the votes counted, the national popular vote was tied, at forty-nine per cent. To be sure, California and the rest of the West had yet to report, which meant this number was sure to move in the President’s favor. Still, the fact remained: in terms of raw numbers, it was a pretty close race. That was not what it seemed like, though. Having run a fiendishly effective campaign, picking up votes exactly where he needed them, Obama had racked up what seemed sure to be a sizable majority in the electoral college. Romney appeared to have lost Florida by one per cent, Ohio and Virginia by two per cent, and Colorado by three per cent. Had he won these four states, he would almost certainly have been the next President.

Elsewhere, though, Obama had done quite a bit better than expected, especially in the Midwest. From Pennsylvania to Michigan to Iowa, he had won comfortably. To the extent that a divided country like the United States has any bellwether states, they are still contained in the industrial region surrounding the Great Lakes. Setting aside Indiana, which is a special case, Obama carried all of them. Was it the auto bailout? Bain Capital? The G.O.P.’s “war on women”? The recovery in the stock market and the housing market? Probably all of the above.

With Obama on his way to the McCormick Place convention center in downtown Chicago to greet his supporters, the talking heads were already vying to predict what would happen next: two more years of Washington deadlock; a civil war inside the Republican Party as the long-muzzled moderates finally take on the likes of Sarah Palin and Grover Norquist; a reinvigorated President ready to reach across the party divide; a boom in the Colorado tourism industry as potheads the world over flock to the Rockies to get high. (A ballot initiative there to legalize marijuana passed by fifty-three per cent to forty-seven per cent.)

Hang on a minute, y’all. Who knows what the future holds? For now, let’s take the measure of what has happened, which is historic enough. For the fifth time in the past six Presidential elections, the Democrats have won the popular vote. For the second time in succession, Americans have elected a black man as President. Throughout the country, Republican extremists like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock have been repudiated. Residents of Maryland and Maine (and probably Washington state, too) have voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. The United States of 2012 hasn’t turned into Scandinavia, but it isn’t the United States of 2010 and the Tea Party either. To the extent that the election was about anything more than negative advertising and relentless micro-targeting, it was a triumph of moderation over extremism, tolerance over intolerance, and the polyglot future over the monochrome past.

The exit polls largely told the story. In the nineteen-to-twenty-nine age group, Obama won sixty per cent of the vote. He got ninety-three per cent of the black vote, seventy per cent of the Hispanic vote, and seventy-five per cent of the Asian vote. Fifty-six per cent of women voted for him, as did sixty-three per cent of unmarried people, two-thirds of secular voters, and about four-fifths of gays and lesbians. Romney carried fifty-nine per cent of white voters (male and female), a majority of all Americans aged forty-five or over, and fifty-seven per cent of married people. In ideological terms, Obama forged a liberal-moderate course to victory. Despite his post-Convention lurch to the center, Romney couldn’t win over enough self-identified moderates. In that group, Obama took fifty-seven per cent of the vote.

Even with an unemployment rate of close to eight per cent and a not too stellar approval rating, the President was able to squeak home. Not surprisingly, when he reached the podium amidst deafening cheers of “four more years,” he thanked “the best campaign team in the history of politics,” and, in case anybody doubted him, he repeated “the best.” He also returned Romney’s compliments, thanked Joe Biden, dubbing him the Happy Warrior—a moniker once owned by Hubert Humphrey—and told his wife that he had never loved her more, or been more proud of her. (If that didn’t earn him a few more rounds of golf with his buddies, I don’t know what will.) For some reason, he neglected to thank Chris Christie. (Perhaps he thought that passing along Bruce Springsteen’s phone number was enough.)

From there it was on to the substance—another pledge to try to coöperate with Republicans, which gave the news reporters something to write about—and the soaring rhetoric, which was much more Denver 2008 than Charlotte 2012. He hailed the nation’s history and diversity, saying, “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, able, disabled, gay, or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.” He even dared to resurrect his mantra of four years ago—hope. “I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests,” he said. “We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe.”

With his wife and daughters around him, and his hair freshly cropped—in the parlance of old British barber shops, he had a new “number one”—the man of whom so much has been written and said looked reënergized and younger than his fifty-one years. Ever the competitor, he was clearly relishing his victory. A truly cynical pundit might have pointed out that it was he who ran a cynical campaign, transforming the election from a referendum on his own record, which he needed Bill Clinton to help him defend, into a referendum on the fitness of Mitt Romney and the Republicans to wield power, while saying relatively little about what he would do in a second term. But this was not a night for nitpicking or Monday-morning quarterbacking. In an ongoing clash of visions, values, and competing economic interests, what matters most is occupying power, and keeping the other team out. Confronting an environment of sluggish economic growth and virtually unlimited campaign contributions, the Obama campaign adopted the tactics that it deemed necessary to defeat the opposition. The candidate gave them free rein. It wasn’t pretty or uplifting, but it worked. Somewhere up there (or down there) Lee Atwater, the patron saint of negative campaigns, is nodding in approval.

It would be a mistake, however, to end on the mechanics of the campaign. Though the day-to-day exchanges were often trivial, the underlying dynamics of the election were deadly serious, and everybody knew what they were. As both candidates repeatedly said, it was about what sort of country we want to be. Now the American public has rendered a judgement. By a small but significant majority, it has rejected the insular, backward-looking, feed-the-rich, extremism of today’s G.O.P., even when that extremism has a standard bearer who is relatively moderate—or, at least, flexible. It has reëlected to office a President who, for all his failings, tried during his first term to address some of the biggest problems facing the country, and did so in a spirit of pragmatism and civility that the Mitt Romney who governed Massachusetts would have appreciated.

More rancor and gridlock may well lie ahead. But yesterday the right side won.

Photograph by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty.