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Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive. Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, 72, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency. To the very end, Mr. McCain’s campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who turned out to hear Mr. Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago.

Mr. McCain also fought the headwinds of a relentlessly hostile political environment, weighted down with the baggage left to him by President Bush and an economic collapse that took place in the middle of the general election campaign.

The day shimmered with history as voters began lining up before dark — hours before polls opened — to take part in the culmination of a campaign that, over the course of two years, commanded an extraordinary amount of attention from the American public. 

As the returns became known, and Mr. Obama passed milestone after milestone, winning Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and New Mexico — many Americans rolled into the streets to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.

For Republicans, especially the conservatives who have dominated the party for nearly three decades, the night represented a bitter setback and left them contemplating where they now stand in American politics.

Mr. Obama led his party in a decisive sweep of Congress, putting Democrats in control of both the House and the Senate — by overwhelming numbers — and the White House for the first time since 1995, when Bill Clinton was president. The president-elect and his expanded Democratic majority now faces the task of governing the country through a difficult period: the likelihood of a deep and prolonged recession.

The roster of defeated Republicans included some notable party moderates – including Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire and Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut– signaling that the Republican conference that convenes in Washington next January will not only be smaller, but more conservative.

Mr. Obama will come into office after an election in which he laid out a number of clear promises: to cut taxes for most Americans, to get the United States out of Iraq in a fast ifand? orderly fashion, and to expand health care. In a recognition of the difficult transition he faces, given the economic crisis, Mr. Obama is expected to begin filling White House jobs as early as this week.

The Democratic sweep took down some well-known Republican senators, including Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and John E. Sununu of New Hampshire. But Democrats failed to achieve the 60-seat majority required to prevent Republican filibusters.

Mr. Obama defeated Mr. McCain in Ohio, a central battleground in American politics, despite a huge effort that brought Mr. McCain and his running-mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, back there repeatedly. Ohio was a state Mr. Obama lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the Democratic primary.

Mr. McCain failed to take from Mr. Obama the two Democratic states that were at the top of his target list: New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. And in addition to Ohio, Democrats captured two other Republican states, Iowa and New Mexico.

Mr. Obama comes into office with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, his vice-presidential running mate. Even before the final results were called, there were indications that Mr. McCain’s advisers were in fact unhappy with their vice-presidential candidate, Ms. Palin, who was announced by Mr. McCain to an explosion of enthusiasm and interest by conservatives and since caused a series of embarrassments for Mr. McCain.

Mr. McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, demurred when asked whether he thought in was happy with Ms. Palin’s performance. “I’m not going to go there,” Mr. Schmidt said. “There’ll be time for the post-mortems in the race.”

Initial signs were that Mr. Obama benefited from a huge turnout of voters, but particularly among blacks. That group of voters made up 13 percent of the electorate on Tuesday, according to surveys of people leaving the polls, compared with 11 percent in 2006. In North Carolina, Republicans said that the huge surge of African-Americans was one of the big factors that lead to Mrs. Dole’s loss.

Mr. Obama also did strikingly well among Hispanic voters, beating Mr. McCain did far less better among those voters than Mr. Bush did in 2004, suggesting the damage the Republican Party has suffered among those voters over four years in which Republicans have been at the forefront on the effort to crack down on illegal immigrants