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Obama Victory is a Monumental Moment in American History

It’s political morning again in America. Arguments over flag lapel pins, plumbers and robocalls are fading from memory, and everybody you bump into recognizes that something huge has happened with the election of Barack Obama. In the grocery line, at the post office, over coffee, we all just sense it.

“I can’t think of another election where the issues were two wars and a crashed economy. There just isn’t any historical precedent for this.” So says Joan Hoff, a former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in New York City.

“It’s an historic turning point … an exclamation point of major proportions to the civil rights movement that goes back to the 1950s.” That’s James McPherson, the renowned author and professor emeritus of history at Princeton University.

Brinkley, the historian who edited the private White House diaries of Ronald Reagan, agrees that Tuesday’s vote marks “the beginning of a new era” in American politics not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1932, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in 1964.

With Obama’s lopsided victory, and the wave that swept more Democrats into both houses of Congress, “a chapter has been closed on the Reagan era, meaning the days of rolling back the Great Society are over,” he says. “A new kind of progressivism will now be taking root.”