America wakes tomorrow to a landscape created by its people. It is a landscape that has been tended over the days, hours and minutes of the last two years by the door-knockers, phone-callers and canvassers, the cake-bakers, the sandwich makers, the lemonade sellers. It is a landscape awash with the work of women and children and men. Out of the ashes of self-loathing and despair that characterized this last decade, despite the obvious drawbacks of his full name, and his dogged determination to claim every part of his personal heritage, from American to Kenya to Indonesia, Barack Hussein Obama built a ground operation that is unparalleled in the history of this country. Never has there been a campaign run so evenly at the top while its foundation, the people who constitute its base, was allowed to, in short, go forth and multiply.

They are mostly small stories, but they were almost always stories of sacrifice, the kind that hurt the individual, the ordinary person, but that, taken together, create the glittering threads out of which history is spun. They are the stories of the ordinary people out of whose lives and actions, citizenship is defined. Sixty workers in Indiana gave up a day’s pay and risked losing their minimum-wage jobs rather than make incendiary calls about Obama. Taxi drivers in Maine made their cabs available to take voters to the polls. A babysitting service in one of Philadelphia’s low-income neighborhoods donated their care to help families get through election day.

As I stepped out this afternoon, I met a man ambling along my street, clipboard and leaflets in hand, systematically going up to houses, checking the resident off his list, hanging his flyer on their door knob. This was after polling had begun. My neighbor was on hand to watch the polls as a legal authority. The Obama office on Main Street, close by, was filled even yesterday with calm, soft spoken volunteers bringing in food for other volunteers, checking each other in, picking up their lists of phone numbers and sitting down to make calls either on their own cell phones or on borrowed ones, or gathering up sheafs of leaflets and clipboards and heading out into the streets. That office was opened just a week ago, at a time when a different sort of candidate would be beginning to shut things down. Obama has consistently refused to take anything for granted. Certainly not his supporters. This evening, at 5.50pm, there was an email reminding me that polls had not yet closed in Virginia and could I please make a few more calls? I, like hundreds of thousands of other volunteers, did. I clicked a button, was given my list and began making my calls and recording the responses, counting down the time left until that particular person could vote, and telling them exactly where they needed to go to do so.

There was a script, as there was at the campaign office downtown, but it was simply a guideline. The words were mine. They were ours. They were the words of African Americans for Obama, Mothers for Obama, Pennsylvanians for Obama, Writers for Obama, Kids for Obama, yes, also, Sri Lankans for Obama. They were the words of people who had decided to speak up and speak out, loud against the usual American nicety of keeping politics to ourselves. Not this time.

Today, my daughters dressed with particular care as they got ready to accompany me to the polls. They walked into the polling station with me, signed in with me, and huddled behind the curtain with me. They watched me select Barack Obama/Joe Biden for President and Vice President of the United States. They, aged 12, 7 and 5, took turns selecting some of the rest of the candidates for State legislators. Then we walked back home, hailing everybody we knew, checking in, asking if people had voted. Every person, every check out counter clerk, every banker, every meat slicer, every teacher, every doughnut bagger, answered with an enthusiastic yes.

In the space of an hour, this past hour, in both John McCain’s concession speech and Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, there was a clear sign that the grace of this moment that has, in the past, generated some of the most poignant moments in American political history, had once more returned. McCain was, again, the person he was when he ran against George Bush eight years ago, a man who spoke with dignity when he said "I wish Godspeed to my friend who was my former opponent and who will be my president," and called on his fellow Americans to continue to believe in the promise of this country.

In his acceptance speech, which began with a hello to Chicago, and a reference to those who question if "America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time." he had a message not only for America but for the world. "Because of what we did on this day, at this defining moment, change has come to America," he promised. To the world he offered what amounted to an armistice, a redefinition of what this country has to offer, and a firm statement that its strength lay not in the power of its arms or extent of its wealth, but the beauty of its ideals.

Obama recognized, repeatedly, the We of his campaign. The people who by their steadfast and sustained actions owned his campaign. The campaign that began despite a sea of doubters, on porches and backyards, with people contributing the five or ten dollars they could afford to send. More importantly, he spoke about a single voter, a 106 year old woman named Anne Nixon Cooper, who voted in Atlanta, who had had been in Selma, and heard Martin Luther King. In honoring her, he harkened to the scourge of racism and the seemingly insurmountable setbacks that this country has seen and overcome. "Yes we can," he repeated, over and over again. "This is our moment, this is our time." It did not take long for the more than 200,000 people who gathered outdoors in Grant Park, from media personalities like Oprah Winfrey to politicians like Jesse Jackson to men and women of all ages, of all colors, all of them with tears pouring down their faces, to pick up the chant: yes we can. As they nodded their affirmation to the words he spoke, to describing a new American century, to offering the nuance that is the cornerstone of international diplomacy, to speaking about the immense power of communities organizing to take care of each other, of personal sacrifice, as they shouted those words out repeatedly, it was clear that in this moment, we as a nation believe that all things are possible under the leadership of this man.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the American people’s poet, Walt Whitman, wrote these words in honor of the political process of his country:

Today, Barack Obama and the passionate engagement he drew from the people he will now lead, gave proof to those words. Yes we did.