Martin Kettle: The challenge ahead - Guardian
Abstract: This election was the Democrats' to lose. As John McCain said in his immensely gracious concession speech in Phoenix, the road for the Republican candidate was a hard one from the outset.

For Obama to have lost the election when the incumbent party had presided over an economic collapse of epochal immensity and over two unsuccessful and unpopular wars, with three quarters of Americans believing their country was heading in the wrong direction and against an opponent who had been nominated by a divided party and who then himself selected a manifestly unqualified and divisive running-mate would have constituted the biggest electoral missed opportunity in generations. It might have persuaded an entire generation that there was absolutely no validity whatever in electoral politics. Millions might have concluded that the only way to get the Republicans out of the White House was by some form of armed insurrection.

(...) Yet, it has to be noted that, if Obama had not won well, that too would have been a shattering blow to the Democratic cause at such a time. In many statewide contests last night, Obama ran behind other Democrats.

One of the most conspicuous of these was in Virginia, where former governor Mark Warner captured the Senate seat formerly held by his Republican namesake John Warner. As the nail-biting nip-and-tuck Obama-McCain battle in Virginia dragged on through the night, Warner was simultaneously coasting to victory on a 60-40 wave of support right through the evening.

There was a similar pattern in North Carolina, where the selfsame voters who comprehensively brought Republican veteran Liddy Dole's senate career to an end, in what was once the seat occupied by Jesse Helms, split right down the middle over the Obama-McCain race.

So, while Obama has a mandate that has been denied to every Democratic president since the days of Martin Luther King, he also has a level of support that he must be careful not to test to destruction. Forty-eight per cent of Americans did not feel the hand of history on their shoulders on Tuesday, in spite of everything.

Yet the election of 2008 feels, in many ways, like the resumption of a progressive project that was mislaid in the convulsions of the 1960s.

But Obama surely knows better than anyone that, if he is to turn this victory into an enduring reshaping of American politics, then the really important election is now the one in 2012, for which the work starts now. (read it all)