My e-mail in-box this morning had five messages with identical headers: “Wow!” Wow, indeed! I am, notoriously, a Cubs fan, and I have learned painfully not to count victories before they are secured — I even saw the Cubs play in a World Series (1945 against Hank Greenberg and the Tigers), but of course I have never seen them win the World Series. I never thought I would live to see anyone remotely like Barack Obama elected President of the United States. But I have! (Could it be that there is hope for the Cubs?)

Younger Americans cannot fully share the astonishment an aging liberal feels on November 5, 2008. I was born in Chicago during the Great Depression (I confess that I have also thought I would never live to see another depression, but I wonder . . .). When I was growing up in the 1940s, it was not possible for a Negro (to use the language of the day) to register at a Loop hotel — de facto segregation was alive and well in America’s northern cities. Of my 330 classmates at a fancy suburban high school, I had four African-American classmates. And the school was literally across the street from a suburb in which both Jews and Blacks were barred by legal covenant from purchasing homes — though it was the home to a Republican senator. The first night of my freshman year in college, a cross, visible from my window, was burned in Harvard Yard, since two of my four African-American classmates, twin brothers, were in an adjacent dorm. None of this feels like ancient history to an American of my age, since it was the country in which we grew up. But the awareness of these injustices was what shaped my politics. I joined both the NAACP and the ACLU while still in high school.

I was one of the thousands of protesters in Grant Park during the Democratic convention in 1968, so you can imagine my feelings watching the victory event in Chicago last night. I thought the only false note in President-elect Obama’s very moving remarks was his opening reference to fulfilling the “dreams of the Founders.” He knows, of course, that a person like him was the farthest thing from the minds and dreams of the Founders. But no matter. He represents, as Garry Trudeau reminded us this morning, the beginnings of the emergence of a postracial America. He is not in the usual sense an “African-American,” though of course he is more truly African and American than the Americans who were brought to this country in chains. Barack Obama represents the triumph of possibility in a democratic nation. He represents the triumph of meritocracy in an increasingly open society. And that, of course, was one of the undercurrents of the past election, for what many Republicans tried to stigmatize as “elitism” was more profoundly the possibility of rewarding merit. I am proud that Obama studied at Columbia and Harvard Law, just as I am thrilled that his wife studied at Princeton. They were not rich kids, and they must have worked incredibly hard to achieve their successes. This was surely one of the messages that the crowds last night were celebrating in Times Square. I celebrate today what they have achieved. Democracy requires meritocratic elites.

The day is short and there is much to do before the sun sets. But I believe in the message of commitment and inclusiveness that Barack Obama articulated last night. I think that my students, coming from a very different place, share that belief. The tasks confronting us are daunting, but yes, we can.