The Illinois senator has shown beyond a doubt that he is the one to lead the nation in troubled times.The stakes were extraordinarily high even before our economy began to spasm and hurtle toward the abyss.From the start of the campaign, Americans were confronted with profound policy choices about how and when to extricate this nation from a war it initiated, how to temper a looming recession, and whether to continue Bush administration policies that had widened the gap between rich and poor, eroded individual liberties, strengthened presidential power, shifted the Supreme Court to the right, weakened relations with our...