Ideas Matter

Every Presidential campaign has a narrative arc. That’s a fancy way of saying it has a beginning, a middle and an end. We always cover that story, and this year was no exception. In fact, in October 2006–more than two years before Election Day and four months before Barack Obama even declared he was running–we forecast the final chapter: Joe Klein’s prescient cover story, “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President.”

But in this campaign cycle, we made a special effort to explore and analyze the ideas that shaped that narrative arc. In elections, ideas matter–they are the themes that influence how voters feel about the candidates. We did cover stories on “How Much Does Experience Matter?,” on “How the Right Went Wrong,” on “How the Democrats Got Religion,” on “The Real Meaning of Patriotism,” on “Why the Economy Is Trumping Race,” on “Does Temperament Matter?” Even more than specific policy issues, these are the ideas and the discussions that voters use to make up their minds. And so we considered it our professional duty to explore and analyze these themes and ideas.

This special election issue looks both forward and backward, from Nancy Gibbs’ virtuoso cover story to Klein’s take on the best-run campaign he’s ever seen to Michael Grunwald’s assessment of the tasks facing the new President to T.D. Jakes on what it means to have a black President to Richard Norton Smith’s wise essay on the end of the Reagan era to our great photographer Callie Shell’s signature pictures of Obama behind the scenes, where she has been positioned for more than two years.

Our extraordinary political team was led this cycle by assistant managing editor Michael Duffy, ably assisted by Washington bureau chief Jay Carney. We also covered the election superbly in real time on TIME.com–spearheaded by TIME.com politics editor Daniel Eisenberg. The indefatigable Mark Halperin drove the daily conversation on The Page, and our political blog, Swampland, was a round-the-clock buffet of ideas, observations and anecdotes. Our national political correspondent Karen Tumulty was everywhere. Michael Scherer covered John McCain; Jay Newton-Small was on Obama, and Nathan Thornburgh excelled on Sarah Palin. And of course, the remarkable Joe Klein may have had his greatest election cycle since he first began covering presidential campaigns in 1976. In addition to TIME’s celebrated political team, the magazine and TIME.com had 30 correspondents and reporters following the vote on Election Day, from Miami to Billings, Mont., from Roanoke, Va., to Honolulu. And that included our Africa bureau chief, Alex Perry, who spent election night with Obama’s extended family in Kenya.

The fact that people around the world woke up to learn that the new American President-elect is Barack Obama is in itself an enormous paradigm shift in their perception of the U.S. We will probably be a majority-nonwhite nation by the year 2042. In a very real way, Obama is the face of the new America.

But this was a signal and transformational election that transcended race. Amid the worst financial crisis in a generation, it marked a return of the idea that politics matters in people’s lives and that government has a necessary and positive role in making America a better place. The fact that we have the right not to vote is one of the beauties of democracy–it’s a sign of the true freedom that we have. But the fact that people turned out in record numbers to vote in this election suggests that our democracy is engaged, that people are taking their civic responsibility seriously. And it’s a reminder, as Justice Louis Brandeis suggested, that the highest office in a democracy is not that of President but that of citizen.

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR