History

MUST READ: Ezra Klein captures it perfect.

The Capitol was a scene today. People everywhere. Hordes of vendors. (If Barack Obama really is a secret Marxist, he's got to be appalled by the quantity of commerce taking place in his name.) Families of all colors. Everybody cold. Kids holding fast to their father's hands, pointing at the big white buildings, demanding commemorative flags, asking to go to the bathroom, standing unhappily in line to tour the halls of Congress. Their parents whispering to each other, pulling them back from the street, exasperated by the burden of entertaining kids in the DC winter but glad they could be there. Not because it was pleasant, or fun, or because you received a free juicer for attending. But because it was important. Because they wanted to be part of wat was happening in Washington this week.

People are proud of their politics again. They can sense that their country has done something that future generations will be proud of. They can sense that they have done something that future generations can be proud of. They were the generation that elected an African-American to the presidency! You can roll that sentence around on the tongue, imagine how it will read in tomorrow's textbooks. Obama's election feels like history. Reads like history. Is history.

For that reason, though, tomorrow will be a strange day. It marks the end of Obama's transition from candidate to president. And president will be a very different role. Obama's campaign was as much about the idea of Obama as the presidency of Obama. There were dry policy plans that sought to reform our tax code and soaring speeches that traced the moral arc of our politics. And the latter, frankly, proved more important than the former. The latter is the only reasons anyone even cared that a first-term senator from Illinois had a tax plan.

What Obama represented mattered. Hope is not a plan and it is not a policy, but people hunger for it. A politics that has room for hope is a politics wherein people can imagine coming together to make tomorrow better than today. That belief is, arguably, the highest purpose of politics. And there was no better evidence for the enduring power of hope than the almost ludicrous idea that a black man could contest the presidency.

And then it was true.

The night Obama became president-elect, he was almost pure idea: The celebrations that took hold on America's streets were not a joyous affirmation of his statements on entitlement reform. They were an explosion of pride at what America had just done, the barriers it had just broken, the boundaries it had just obliterated. For a few weeks, Obama was hardly even a partisan figure, much less a tawdry politician. He was living history.

The past two months have marked his slow transition from idea into president. What Obama meant is increasingly submerged beneath what Obama does. The fact that we elected a black man says little about how we spend the TARP dollars, or mediate the conflict in Gaza, or stimulate the economy. Tomorrow, our politics will be at its highest point in memory. We will have elected an African-American. We will be inaugurating a president with higher approval ratings than any other incoming executive since the advent of polling. But then politics will quiet, for a little while at least, and governance will take over. Obama will stop representing things and start doing things.

Obama's next task, then, is harder. To recast governance much as he recast politics. Success would look different, to be sure. Good governance is often more technical than inspiring. It need not feel like history. But nor should governance deject Americans, or disgust them, or appear impervious to their input. The power of Obama's election is that it felt like the country's accomplishment. That is easier in an election: The country votes. Such a direct connection may not be possible in governance. But if governance can feel again like it works on behalf of the public, like it takes seriously their concerns and works daily to meet their expectations, then that would be something better than hope. That would be change.