During the campaign of 2004 -- which this morning seems about as long ago as the campaign of 1832 -- Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., went to the White House for a congressional meeting with President George W. Bush, wearing a new campaign button.

The president gave the button a perplexed look, and asked, "Osama?"

No, said Schakowsky, it was Illinois' Democratic Senate candidate, Barack Obama. Bush shrugged and said he'd never heard of him.

"Mr. President," said Schakowsky, "you will."

This morning -- sooner than either of them, or anybody else, might have expected -- everyone has heard of Barack Obama, and the United States has elected its first African American president. The voting marks the end of a long campaign, but surely the beginning of something even bigger.

During her campaign for the Democratic nomination, back in the winter and spring, Hillary Clinton liked to find women in their nineties, born into a country where they couldn't vote, eager to vote for a woman for president. It was intended to be moving, and it was.

But Barack Obama has now been elected to lead a country where, at the time of his birth, millions of Americans who looked like him were kept from voting by violence and intimidation. Obama campaigned and contended in states where, during his preschool years, his parents' very marriage would have been illegal.

This, like the lines of people waiting three hours in the Georgia sun to vote, is something more than moving. The demonstration that there is now literally no position closed to an African American brings a partial closing to the nation's longest and most agonizing division.

Obama's triumph, over the 21 months of his campaign, was not simply to show that an African American could be a serious candidate for president, and to electrify that community. It was to create a sense of possibility in a wider audience, especially a younger audience, to make them believe that a different kind of politics was possible. From the beginning of his campaign, Obama has had a particular appeal to voters too young for their cynicism to have hardened.

His victory was no narrow squeeze; Obama ran better among white voters than any Democratic presidential candidate in decades.

For two decades, it has seemed that American politics has been locked into a punishing, unproductive trench warfare between the two parties, an endless refighting of battles about culture and country dating from the 1960s. Watching one recent national convention, David Broder of The Washington Post commented to a younger colleague that when the Baby Boomers reached nursing homes, they would be pounding on each others' walkers and yelling about Vietnam. The Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years tended to underline his point.

Obama, from a later time and free of that tie-dyed burden, offered an opportunity to finally change the subject, an opportunity the country has now embraced.

Colin Powell, in his important endorsement of Obama, said he thought Obama could be a "transformational" president. It's a big word, and a judgment finally left to historians from future decades, if not future centuries.

But Powell's point was that Obama, as not only the first African American president but a product of a post-civil rights world, a figure of extraordinary eloquence, analysis and ability to connect, carries the chance of transforming our politics, and both the way the United States sees itself in the world and the way the world sees the United States.

In 2008, these are all desperately needed changes.

Every president takes office promising to make the United States a different country than it was. Few succeed, and Obama's White House plans, like those of any other president, deserve to be viewed through that prism of improbability.

But through his historic campaign, and his impressive, once implausible triumph, Obama has already done something that few presidents manage during their entire term in office.

He has shown us that we are a different country than we thought we were.

And from that realization, we can now go forward.

This piece is courtesy of The Oregonian Editorial Board, 11/05/2008.