There were cheers in the Union debating chamber as those who had made it to 4am were greeted with the news that Barack Obama would continue as the President of the United States. Everyone was more enthusiastic than I had expected – perhaps a result of exhaustion or the simple thrill of watching a historic moment with many other people.

But, interestingly, the cheers were also shot through with one unmistakable emotion: relief. This wasn’t the sound of 2008, the year of barriers being broken, human civilisation grandly marching onward. Nobody was weeping. The re-election of a black man to the American Presidency is a strange event; its greatest achievement is the normalisation of the idea that the son of a Kenyan goatherd could be President and once normalised it hardly feels like an achievement.

So the historic qualities of the man take a back seat this time around. We UK students are left to be thankful that America has avoided the worst. There will be no Supreme Court appointments paving the way to the banning of abortions, no insane war-mongering with Iran, no reckless gutting of the social safety net, obscene transferral of wealth upwards or undoing of America’s first comprehensive healthcare system. The Senate and Presidency will remain in Democratic hands and the House in Republican ones, with barely altered majorities. Two billion dollars have been spent so that the electoral votes of Indiana and North Carolina could switch sides. Progressives are reduced to cheering as loudly as possible for the status quo, and hoping against hope that Obama might be bolder in this next term.

What happened to all the “Hope and Change”? This snarky question is getting very tired now. Nobody really expected Obama to be Lincoln, Jesus and Gandhi rolled into one, not if they took the 2008 election seriously. But people always love a narrative, want to feel that they’re watching today’s great story: to be there for today’s equivalent of Martin Luther King speaking from the Lincoln Memorial. When I first read about Obama in 2005, nobody here had heard of him, and like an insufferable hipster I grandly proclaimed he would be the “First Black President”. It was slightly weird watching it come true, maybe something like watching a cheesy Hollywood underdog story. So my growing political maturity has been inextricably bound to Obama’s progress, watching the story become complicated as I always knew it must. It turns out that Obama is an arrogant man, that he lacks the skills of negotiation and that he can be – bizarrely for someone who has got so far on the strength of his oratory – a terrible communicator.

What I yearned for in those early days of the presidency was a great achievement for Obama, something that would put him on Rushmore. Roosevelt created Social Security and defeated the Nazis, Lincoln freed the slaves, Washington defeated the British – and Obama? What would Obama do? It became pretty clear early in 2009 that his great task would be to lift an economy out of prolonged economic torpor and deal with an unsustainable long-term national debt. And, frankly, dealing with a fiscal crisis just doesn’t have the ring of history to it.

Ever since the crash of 2008 we’ve come to know just how dull can be the trudge to get out of a recession that begins with several years of debt deleveraging. The healthcare reform Obama passed is fairly good given all the special interests involved – but fairly isn’t quite good enough. I was in Mississippi at the time the bill passed and I watched the full session of Congress in a cold, lonely motel room knowing that this was history and I couldn’t miss it. And yet all I could think, as the Congressmen stalked up and down the aisles was: is this it? A mandate saying that everyone buy corporate insurance and that the very poor get given some assistance in doing so? This the great, defining moment of Obama’s Presidency?

So the students in the Union were cheering for something, but perhaps they weren’t quite sure what. After all, the extraordinary obstacles to Obama’s ability to get things done remain: the Republican House of Representatives can still block anything he sends through. The next four years will undoubtedly involve few great legislative victories and a lot of messy compromise to get anything done at all. Yet there is one great threat to America that Obama still can defeat; one great task appropriate to the historic stature of his presidency: he can bring the Republican Party back to reality.

There’s a great Monty Python sketch involving a UK election in which the two main parties are the Sensible Party and the Silly Party, one presumably representing any and all policies within the realms of reason, and the other everything outside it. We appear to have got to that point in America now. The epistemic closure of conservative America, as exemplified in the propagandistic echo chamber of Fox News, is a disaster for America even when they aren’t winning. It creates a situation in which the various Democrats now run the gamut of every reasonable policy; an impossibly wide base for any government party to operate on.

If Obama, starting with this victory, can force Republicans to leave their ideological bubble and face reality, he will have ended their drift into self-righteous madness that began back in the 60s.The idea that if right wing equals good then more right wing must equal better is what has given us the Iraq war, climate change denial, and the zealous devotion to ravenous free market economics. It is a task which Obama’s unifying rhetoric “no red states and no blue states”, on Wednesday morning, was built for. Now that the Republicans have had to face the truth of their failure, some might begin to listen.

The fact that there was a black man in the White House for four years seems less important in comparison to the fact that there is now, as Andrew Sullivan put it on Stephen Colbert’s election show, “A black man in the White House with nothing to lose.” Without the fear of another election, Obama can be bold in his dealings with the Republicans. And if they finally see the sense in co-operating with him, of leaving behind their endless rightward drift into fantasy, then Obama will have earned a lot of cheers indeed.