Obama wins a second term. (Flickr Creative Commons)

Barack Obama won a second term as president, emerging victorious in the battle over swing states with a middle class sensibility and vigorous campaigning through the last weeks of the 2012 campaign.

He was declared the projected winner around 8:12 p.m.  He got 284 electoral votes at the moment of victory with a possibility of winning over 300 once all the votes get counted.  Obama put the dagger in Romney's campaign when he won Ohio, right after winning Iowa and Colorado.  An earlier win in Wisconsin took another Romney route to victory.

It looked like Romney might win the popular vote, but pollsters predicted that the president would actually pull ahead by one to 1.5 percent.

In what became the most expensive campaign of all time, the president stuck to an old-school Democrat mentality in appealing to working class voters while also maintaining support from mega-celebrities like Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen.

President Obama had to run the country while campaigning for reelection in 2012, which put him under unique scrutiny as voters scrambled to understand just what Obama had done in the last four years and whether it amounted to Hope and Change.  "I believe in you because you still believe in me," Obama said at rallies.

While he had a list of foreign policy victories, Obama had to defend his record on the economy as the Romney campaign belabored the notion that the Republican candidate would do more for small business because of his background in the corporate world.

During the campaign, however, events like the Libya embassy attack and Superstorm Sandy showed voters the potential of Obama's gracefulness as leader.  As Election Day loomed, the president tactfully proved to the country that he could act under pressure, especially since his job was on the line. 

The Obama of the 2012 campaign couldn't rely solely on charm and image to steamroll into Election Day.  He had to prove to swing state voters that his record, his intentions and his empathy stretched beyond what a potential Romney administration could do for them. 

Case in point: Ohio, where voters tend socially conservative but couldn't resist what Obama had done for the auto industry, especially in light of the much-invoked Romney quote "Let Detroit go bankrupt."  Obama's message for the middle class resonated with the blue collar people of Ohio, and Obama won the state that Republicans have never lost in winning campaigns.

Obama showed a grit that convinced the middle class that if reelected he would move the country "Forward," as his campaign slogan went.  With unemployment rates higher than any incumbent would hope for, the president convinced an issue-minded electorate that his administration exists on a continuum.  He convinced the country to trust him, even with a stern opposing ticket breathing down his neck with ugly figures and percentages.

The president also managed to survive a bad showing in the first debate, where he seemed uninvolved in the urgency of the moment.  Romney's win there gave the Republican ticket a boost that pushed them out of a dismal rut and made the rest of the race very competitive. 

Maybe Obama won many votes for being the lesser of two evils in this race, but there was little thought that the president was out of touch or unfeeling--attitudes that Romney had to shake off.  The president had to debunk the creeping suspicion that he had had an ineffective four years that didn't deliver on 2008's promises.

The fringe left felt disappointed with Obama for feeding the partisan paradigm during his presidency, failing to be as progressive as they perhaps imagined.  But Obama ran as a Democrat, not on a third-party ticket.  In 2008, it would've been more naive to expect him to smash the two-party model than to hope for some kind of intangible change that would sweep through the country in four years.

So even as the president's drone strike program and Wall Street detente enters a second term, so does the progress that's brought this country further towards a real freedom, one that's not based on words or ideology so much as opportunity and change.  

Now that the country has reelected Obama, it's time for him to truly disprove the notion that a Republican president would "get this country back on track."  It's time for him to keep moving forward.     

Read more of Neon Tommy's coverage of the 2012 presidential election here.

Reach Assistant News Editor Michael Juliani here.