By Lee A. Daniels:

Perhaps they should re-stage the November 4 vote for president. Apparently now there are even more people who want to vote for Barack Obama than actually did on that day.

That’s the conclusion one can draw from post-election polls which show that the proportion of Americans who think Obama’s the right person for the job of leading the country is significantly higher now than it was on Election Day.

In fact, according to surveys conducted shortly after the election by both the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Gallup Organization, two-thirds of voters expressed confidence that Obama would have a successful first term, and the same percentage said the country will be better off four years from now with Obama in the White House.

Those findings are striking because Obama won the election with 53 percent of the vote.

This “landslide greeting from the American public,” in the words of Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is even more noteworthy. It’s buoyed by the Gallup finding that 45 percent of voters who described themselves as conservative also said they were “confident in (Obama’s) ability to be a good president.” On voting day, only 23 percent of voters who described themselves as conservative voted for Obama.

These and other extraordinary findings embedded in the Pew, Gallup and other surveys suggest something more is at work than just the normal relaxation of the intense campaign-duration partisanship presidential contests produce in voters.

They suggest that in the 2008 election the majority of voters continued to act on the three most important messages the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections underscored. That election shifted control of the Congress from the GOP to the Democrats and laid the foundation for Obama’s victory this month.

The first message – in response to the divisive winner-take-all politics the Republican Party had practiced for twelve years, until it produced the tawdry revelations of GOP Representative Mark Foley trolling for sexual thrills among the Congressional pages in late August 2006 – was: Enough!

The second, it’s now clear, was fully understood only by Barack Obama and his team. That was the declaration of a significant part of the electorate: We want to participate.

And the third can best be described by an insight Albert Einstein expressed numerous times in different combinations of words: In the midst of crisis lies opportunity.

Black Americans have always intuitively understood that. They’ve spent their entire sojourn in America finding opportunity in the midst of the crisis racism has continually tried to make them accept as the boundaries of their existence.

Now, what the majority of American voters have done in electing Barack Obama to the presidency is to see – and seize – the opportunity in the midst of our nation’s multi-faceted crisis.

Writ large, that opportunity is the same one Barack Obama saw (beyond personal ambition; nothing wrong with that): the chance to renew America’s proper sense of itself in order to forge an American identity that works for these first decades of the twenty-first century.

In other words, both Obama and a majority of the electorate have realized that the governance crisis of the last eight years – of the Bush administration’s multiple failures in Iraq and on the world’s diplomatic stage and bungling of its domestic responsibilities – had a broader meaning.

In that regard, the top-down-driven economic crisis now scourging America’s socio-economic landscape put an exclamation point to the change in our public-sector, private-sector and individual practices that must occur if the country is to revive and prosper.

Additionally, the Obama administration must also overcome the challenge of properly fighting the global war on terror, of solving the crisis of illegal Latino immigration, and of inspiring Americans to embrace their future as part of a multicultural nation.

Obama’s election has not eliminated the threat these crises present. But what the polls suggest it has done is harness four fundamental qualities that the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century displayed so powerfully and poignantly: faith, shrewdness, commitment and discipline.

None of this means America has reached a kumbaya moment where our racial history and tensions are magically whisked away forever. Immense difficulties and bitter disputes lie ahead.

But a more vibrant momentum for progressive movement does now exist, rooted in the success of the Obama campaign’s full-scale mobilization of a majority of the American people.

Equally important, we should realize that it succeeded because the American people wanted to be mobilized.

That is the meaning of the incredible numbers Obama pulled out to his rallies throughout the campaign. That is the meaning of the stunning fund-raising success he had among ordinary people. That is the meaning of the landslide-proportion of votes he drew from traditional Democratic constituencies – blacks, Latinos and Jews, for example – and the critical gains he scored among other voter blocs.

The Obama campaign tapped into the deep reservoir of the American people’s willingness to be politically engaged.

That’s one way to say it.

Another is to say that he tapped into the deep reservoir of the America people’s patriotism.

The Obama campaign understood that the American people have been waiting to be mobilized for a just cause – waiting to be asked ask not what your country can do for you – since the attacks of 9/11.

The wait is over. The call has gone out and, it appears at this pre-inauguration stage of the presidency of Barack Obama, that is has been heeded by more Americans who now see the opportunity in the midst of America’s crisis: the chance the Obama election has brought into being of restoring three qualities too-long ignored by too many of those at the highest levels of American society: discipline, competence and compassion.

Lee A. Daniels is editor-in-chief of TheDefendersOnline.com