LET him savour, for a day or two, a victory that many had said could not happen. No president since FDR had been re-elected with unemployment so high. The country seemed pessimistic and bitterly divided, on racial grounds even more than on economic ones. His best-known achievement, health-care reform, had turned out to be deeply unpopular. The Republicans spent $800m trying to remove him. Yet on November 6th Barack Obama carried all the states he won four years ago, bar only Indiana and North Carolina, for a solid victory over Mitt Romney of 332 electoral-college votes to 206; the Democrats tightened their grip on a Senate they had once been expected to lose; and the president gave his best speech for several years.