Ten Words from Today's NY Times - November 7, 2012

Mr. Obama’s re-election extended his place in history, carrying the tenure of the nation’s first black president into a second term.

The law will now continue on course toward nearly full implementation in 2014, promising to change significantly the way medical services are administrated nationwide.

Confident that the economy is finally on a true path toward stability, Mr. Obama and his aides have hinted that he would seek to tackle some of the grand but unrealized promises of his first campaign, including the sort of immigration overhaul that has eluded presidents of both parties for decades.

“We have given our all to this campaign,” said Mr. Romney, stoic and gracious in his remarks.

The president built a muscular campaign organization and used a strong financial advantage to hold off an array of forces that opposed his candidacy.

“I feel like it’s a repudiation of everything the Republicans said in the campaign,” said Jasmyne Walker, 31, who jumped up and down on the edge of a stone planter in a downtown plaza.

More seasoned and scarred, less prone to grandiosity and perhaps even less idealistic, Mr. Obama returns for a second term with a Congress still at least partly controlled by an opposition party that will claim a mandate of its own.

Liberals who swallowed their misgivings during the campaign said they would resume pressure on the president to fight for their ideas.

“If you have no credibility, if you can’t establish some sort of victory here, you will be marginalized by your own party and the other side very quickly.”

Though many Republicans still see no impetus for drastic change, there does seem to be a growing consensus that the party needs to somehow repair its relations with the nation’s Hispanics, a group that has socially and fiscally conservative tendencies and one in which Republicans enjoyed some success during the administration of former President George W. Bush.