Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a  white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly  credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the  forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural  balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600  Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African  heritage.

Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten  legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has  become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire  condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States  was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally  sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the  priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than  two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a  month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent.  Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market  collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures  and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The  automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as  Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of  historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in  Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great  Depression.

At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and  unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four  thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral  damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflict’s price in blood  and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the  torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on  September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still  strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living  securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.

As if to intensify the sense of crisis, on Inauguration Day the  national-security apparatus informed the President-elect that Al Shabaab, a  Somali affiliate of the Al Qaeda network, had sent terrorists across the  Canadian border and was planning an attack on the Mall, possibly on Obama  himself. That danger proved illusory; the others proved to be more onerous than  anyone had imagined. The satirical paper The Onion came up with a  painfully apt inaugural headline: “BLACK MAN GIVEN  NATION’S WORST JOB.”

Barack Obama began his Presidency devoted to the idea of  post-partisanship. His rhetoric, starting with his “Red State, Blue State” Convention speech, in 2004, and his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” was  imbued with that idea. Just as in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he had  tried to reconcile the disparate pasts of his parents, Obama was determined to  bring together warring tribes in Washington and beyond. He extended his hand to  everyone from the increasingly radical leadership of the congressional  Republicans to the ruling mullahs of the Iranian theocracy. The Republicans,  however, showed no greater interest in working with Obama than did the  ayatollahs. The Iranian regime went on enriching uranium and crushing its  opposition, and the Republicans, led by Dickensian scolds, including the Senate  Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, committed themselves to a single goal: to  engineer the President’s political destruction by defeating his major  initiatives. Obama, for his part, did not always prove particularly adept at, or  engaged by, the arts of retail persuasion, and his dream of bipartisanship  collided with the reality of obstructionism.

Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent  supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical  expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in  his policy failures (on GuantÁnamo, climate change, and gun control); others  question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course,  2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the  reËlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same  level of communal pride. But the reËlection of a President who has been  progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious  matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and  foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering  and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the  honor of the office he holds.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the $787-billion stimulus  package—was well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and  Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars  than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. It reversed the  job-loss trend—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6  million private-sector jobs have been created since June, 2009—and helped reset  the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in  infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s interstate-highway program. From the  start, though, Obama recognized that it would reap only modest political gain. “It’s very hard to prove a counterfactual,” he told the journalist Jonathan  Alter, “where you say, ‘You know, things really could have been a lot worse.’ ” He was speaking of the bank and auto-industry bailouts, but the problem applies  more broadly to the stimulus: harm averted is benefit unseen.

As for systemic reform, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer  Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in July, 2010, tightened capital  requirements on banks, restricted predatory lending, and, in general, sought to  prevent abuses of the sort that led to the crash of 2008. Against the counsel of  some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the Obama Administration led the  takeover, rescue, and revival of the automobile industry. The Administration  transformed the country’s student-aid program, making it cheaper for students  and saving the federal government sixty-two billion dollars—more than a third of  which was put back into Pell grants. AmeriCorps, the country’s largest  public-service program, has been tripled in size.

Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the  national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World  War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical  care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by  the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics  urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite  its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing.  Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is  the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of  Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it.

Obama has passed no truly ambitious legislation related to climate change,  shying from battle in the face of relentless opposition from congressional  Republicans. Yet his environmental record is not as barren as it may seem. The  stimulus bill provided for extensive investment in green energy, biofuels, and  electric cars. In August, the Administration instituted new fuel-efficiency  standards that should nearly double gas mileage; by 2025, new cars will need to  average 54.5 miles per gallon.

President Obama’s commitment to civil rights has gone beyond rhetoric. During  his first week in office, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which  protects women, minorities, and the disabled against unfair wage discrimination.  By ending the military’s ban on the service of those who are openly gay, and by  endorsing marriage equality, Obama, more than any previous President, has been a  strong advocate of the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. Finally, Obama  appointed to the Supreme Court two highly competent women, Elena Kagan and Sonia  Sotomayor, the Court’s first Hispanic. Kagan and Sotomayor are skilled and  liberal-minded Justices who, abjuring dogmatism, represent a sober and sensible  set of jurisprudential values.

In the realm of foreign policy, Obama came into office  speaking the language of multilateralism and reconciliation—so much so that the  Nobel Peace Prize committee, in an act as patronizing as it was premature,  awarded him its laurels, in 2009. Obama was embarrassed by the award and  recognized it for what it was: a rebuke to the Bush Administration. Still, the  Norwegians were also getting at something more affirmative. Obama’s Cairo  speech, that same year, tried to help heal some of the wounds not only of the  Iraq War but, more generally, of Western colonialism in the Middle East.  Speaking at Al Azhar University, Obama expressed regret that the West had used  Muslim countries as pawns in the Cold War game of Risk. He spoke for the rights  of women and against torture; he defended the legitimacy of the State of Israel  while offering a straightforward assessment of the crucial issue of the  Palestinians and their need for statehood, citing the “humiliations—large and  small—that come with occupation.”

It was an edifying speech, but Obama was soon instructed in the limits of  unilateral good will. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hu  Jintao, and other autocrats hardened his spirit. Still, he proved a  sophisticated and reliable diplomat and an effective Commander-in-Chief. He kept  his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He forbade torture. And he  waged a far more forceful campaign against Al Qaeda than Bush had—a campaign  that included the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiated—and won Senate  approval of—a crucial strategic-arms deal with the Russians, slashing warheads  and launchers on both sides and increasing the transparency of mutual  inspections. In Afghanistan, he has set a reasonable course in an impossible  situation.

The unsettled situations in Egypt and Libya, following the Arab Spring of  2010, make plain that that region’s political trajectory is anything but fixed.  Syria shames the world’s inaction and confounds its hopes of decisive  intervention. This is where Obama’s respect for complexity is not an indulgence  of intellectual vanity but a requirement for effective action. In the case of  bin Laden, it was necessary to act alone and at once; in Libya, in concert with  the Europeans; in Iran, cautiously but with decisive measures.

One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual  temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be  the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph  of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed  his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural Élan, at the White  House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no  guarantee of success, dispatched Navy SEAL Team  Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known  to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse  movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the  country, well.

But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the  world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his  temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as  in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks  of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely  passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies  he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely,  and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must  clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how  he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt  crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in  Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line  with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger  vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.

There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the  one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The  Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a  fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After  running for the Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward  Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the  2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundred-million-dollar federal  bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and,  working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive  health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since.

In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the  priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and  rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise  government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense  and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R.  Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second  Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we  add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for  those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P.  would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise  poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression  that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.

Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay  federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income  workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth  and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes.  His descent to this cynical view—further evidenced by his selection of a running  mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican—has  been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in  public life—the Massachusetts health-care law—because its national  manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in  general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws,  climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of  foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and  endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.

But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he  said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the  socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is  in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred  when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur  creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that&rdquo. The Republicans  continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary  entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all  from government or society.

If the keynote of Obama’s Administration has been public investment—whether  in infrastructure, education, or health—the keynote of Romney’s candidacy has  been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the  supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a  political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned  with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its  failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and  certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the  polity.

Private equity has served Romney well—he is said to be worth a quarter of a  billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a  President, but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt—or Teddy Roosevelt or John  Kennedy—Romney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions  of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay  extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem  content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of  all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see  business success as a sure sign of moral virtue.

The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with  custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returns—a  refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential  nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the  tax code’s gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman  Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money  belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments.

But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in  foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre,  ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold  War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order,  to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win  the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical  supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the  thorniest of foreign-policy problems—from Pakistan to Syria—his campaign has  offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated  faith in “American exceptionalism.”

In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and  keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their  signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever  was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has  rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign  promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to  ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings  of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing  judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their  seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the  more liberal incumbents, and Romney’s adviser in judicial affairs is the  embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of  a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by  appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney  Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat  to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and  pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past  oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to  insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money.  Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to  believe him.

The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a  constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the  public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and  exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the  Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we  climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has  been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future  that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.

The reËlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we  in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent  in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness  and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive  imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a  social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every  Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s  America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice,  tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country  deserves. ♦