First, he is America's first black president -- notwithstanding Toni Morrison's gushings about Bill Clinton -- and his election is a watershed moment in the long, painful history of the country's resolution of the contradiction between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the fact of slavery and its aftermath. (Strictly speaking, Obama, D-Ill., is half-black, but this is America, and Tiger Woods became the first black golfer to win a major, not the first Asian golfer.)

Second, Obama rewrote the electoral handbook and redrew the electoral map, turning red states blue in the Mountain West -- Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada -- and beginning to eat into the states of the old Confederacy -- Virginia, North Carolina. On Tuesday he also rewrote the political map of America as no one has done since Ronald Reagan. Only Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt in the past century have come to power through achieving such far-reaching political realignments in their election victories.

Third, Obama's great victory, winning more votes than any other individual in American history, has left Karl Rove's Permanent Republican Majority strategy looking like a sad and delusional fantasy. Obama took the election into counties dyed deep red. He both profited from changes in the face of the electorate and helped to bring about some of those changes.

Fourth, the world interest in this election was probably unprecedented, and in some real sense he starts off as the first truly global U.S. president in terms of his support.

Fifth, who would ever imagine that a freshman U.S. senator, whatever his ethnicity, would have a prayer at running successfully for president? The only other one ever to do it was Sen. Warren Harding, R-Ohio, who won the presidential election of 1920 at the end of his first six-year term in the Senate.

Obama's election is a major milestone on the path from the compromises of the Founding, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years ago. Obama is the leader of a new generation of African-Americans too young to be involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He is the first black national presidential candidate whose appeal was not specifically to black voters. He performed the alchemy of appealing beyond race and yet making his own racial origins a central part of what his campaign stood for and of his vision of America.

Obama lost the white vote overall to his opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., but he did no worse among whites than the two previous Democratic presidential nominees, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in 2004 and Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

Far more voters reported that age was a consideration in choosing between the candidates -- 40 percent -- than race -- 17 percent -- according to CNN. And many of the 17 percent who said race was their deciding issue were African-Americans voting for Obama because he is black. African-American participation was way up and was an important factor in his ultimate win. Race was both not an issue in the campaigns and yet a hugely important factor.

In the end, Obama's great registration campaign paid off. First-time voters made up 11 percent of the electorate, and they broke for Obama 2 to 1. Young voters, the 18-29 age group, also went for Obama 2 to 1, though they didn't make up any more of the total vote than in the past two elections.

Obama also went after evangelicals, supposedly a core Republican constituency, and he made some inroads compared with previous elections. He won the Hispanic vote 2 to 1, and that was the major reason he took Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Incumbent President George W. Bush took 40 percent of this vote in 2004, but McCain managed only 30 percent of it.

Ironically, McCain's historic record on immigration was courageously moderate and had cost him much conservative support in the past. But he paid big for the prevailing orthodoxy of his party on this issue.

Bush had close and trusted confidante Karen Hughes lead a public diplomacy initiative to try to undo the damage done to U.S. international standing by his no-holds-barred policies in the war on terror. Hughes toiled away for some time with no visible results. By contrast, Obama has reversed the popular international perception of the United States at a stroke by being elected. This may change if he starts pursuing a protectionist trade policy, as some of his constituencies will demand, but it is still no mean feat.

Finally, Obama has tapped into something in the American psyche that doesn't have a whole lot to do with policy positions but a very great deal indeed to do with Americans' idealized and inspirational vision of what they want themselves to be.

A handful of great U.S. leaders, from Abraham Lincoln through Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, have enjoyed this rare and extraordinary gift. Obama has now inherited the opportunity, the privilege and the responsibility of using it to guide this great nation into the perils and challenges of the 21st century.