A thin, gray-haired man pushed his glasses up to his pale forehead and wiped his eyes. A young woman, overwhelmed by the news, screamed, then fell into a crouch, her dark shoulders trembling as she wept.

Around them, thousands in that park in Chicago, and many, many more Americans in city streets, churches, community halls, airport bars and shopping malls alternately shed tears of joy and relief and jubilantly celebrated.

Deep in Palolo Valley, someone set off a string of firecrackers, the flurry of pops and crackles echoing the beat of drums in Harlem, the slap of hands in Atlanta and chants of the new president's name from Japan to Kenya and Indonesia, to the gates outside the White House where a slim, cool, steady black man will soon take up residence and the reins of power.

In the days to come, experts will go on deconstructing Barack Obama's campaign strategy and analyzing its grassroots and ground games, the role of the Internet, communications technology and more political “;inside baseball”; stuff.

There was all that, but “;there was something else,”; one of the slew of TV pundits said, a “;something”; few of them seemed able to pin down. Obama's win was entwined with the distress among Americans who had had enough of their national ideals being stained and distorted, of their livelihoods being drained, of intractable wars and cultural conflicts.

Had it not been for the Bush presidency, the opportunity for Obama might not have risen.

Where one has brandished fear and division, the other reaches for promise and inclusion. Where one has thrown up smokescreens and confidence games, the other acknowledges serious issues honestly and with a call for help and consensus.

Obama won because he counted on sensible people to understand and embrace reasonable thoughts and plans of action.

He believed in their desire to shed the weight of disunity seeded by leaders who saw gain in pitting people against each other, who read the country as splotches of red and blue, looked at the future as a calendar of four-year balloting cycles, whose goals were retributive, to install a narrow ideology of the few in place of the broad views of the many.

He refused to be identified solely as a black man or as multicultural or exotic, but as a human whose colors and background inform him, stretch his perspective.

Though this allows him to view people without categories, Obama's election is of great significance in the nation's racial history. For African-Americans, seeing a face like his in full, sweet glory of success must be truly wonderful, and while shared, can only be imagined by others.

For local people, watching a native son make good resonates deeply. So often seen as an incidental place of sun-surf frivolity, Hawaii can lay claim at least to have contributed to the development of his character, even though Chicago also holds him as its own.

But Obama is no longer the Punahou grad, nor is he the “;skinny senator”; from Illinois, as he has called himself. He now belongs to the nation, tied forever to its ambition and its dreams.

He has come to this place because he trusted voters. Above all, he trusted America to right itself, to find its way out of the weeds. It is the “;something”; that was missing and has been found.