History Made, And in the Making

Election 2008 is over, with the results reverberating not just across the United States, but around the world.

Moments after a run of West Coast victories transformed candidate Barack Obama into President-elect, encomia from world leaders began flooding in. Australia's prime minister Kevin Rudd recalled Martin Luther King's dream that we be judged by "the content of our character." France's Nicolas Sarkozy waxed prosaic, offering congratulations on a "brilliant victory." Elsewhere in Europe leaders leaned towards the lyrical, with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso speculating about Obama's opportunity to craft a "new deal for a new world," while a German European Parliamentarian talked of a "new dawn" in trans-Atlantic relations.

Even Teheran offered something resembling a rhetorical olive branch, as Ayatollah Khamenei saw in Obama's ascendancy "capacity for improvement" in the relationship with the superpower-formerly-known-as "the Great Satan." Seldom have so many diplomatic mash-notes been sent in Washington's direction.

Apparently, however, Dmitry Medvedev didn't get the memo. Russia's president dispensed with any congratulatory cable and took the occasion of Barack Obama's victory to deliver a not-so-veiled threat: If the U.S. and its Eastern European allies persist in deploying a missile shield, Russia will forward-deploy ballistic missiles within range of major European capitals. Moscow specified the site for the missile systems: Kaliningrad, a sliver of Russian soil wedged between Poland and the Baltics, within 500 kilometers of Warsaw, Prague and Berlin.

It was a harsh signal that, even at this historical moment, America will not be the sole determiner of the history to be made.

It is a message not likely to be lost on the new President-elect. While American anchorpersons small-talked about Barack Obama's plans for the day – his campaign announced he would take his daughters to school and then hit the gym - we know that there was a new wrinkle in his routine this morning: His first PDB, President's Daily Brief, as President-elect. In some ways, what he hears will not be wholly new. His closest national security advisors will have been sharing their window onto this world for many months now. But the stark reality of this maiden briefing – this compendium of all the threats and whispers worldwide of plots hatched against U.S. citizens and U.S. interests, compressed into a presentation lasting 15 to 20 minutes – will put that counsel in a new perspective.

And that is where a history 232 years in the making and history yet to be made will intersect.

Sometime on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, after the swearing in on the Capitol steps, after the motorcade down the 16 blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue, there will come a moment when the 44th President of the United States retreats to the upstairs room that Lincoln simply called "the shop" – humble precursor to today's ornate Oval Office, and the place where Lincoln's hand signed the paper that freed the slaves.

At that moment, outside the public eye, a new president will draw strength as none before has done from his nation's quest to form a "more perfect union."

That quest is the source of America's great strength - and the well-spring of a president's moral mandate to lead. And on this day after the election, in a world where our safety and security are at risk, we must step for a moment beyond politics and partisanship to pray that this president like his predecessors will find the strength to succeed.