Today is the midpoint of Barack Obama's first term as president of the United States of America. When scholars look back at this moment a century from now, what will they make of it?

They, of course, will have the advantage of knowing facts about which we can only speculate, starting with whether Obama was re-elected to a second term. And with the passage of time, they will be able to put into calmer perspective the ferocious partisan politicking over such issues as health care reform in which we're embroiled, discerning overall patterns and trends where those of us in the storm can only perceive the waves.

My guess is that, to future historians, our times won't seem merely like a struggle between liberals and conservatives, or Republicans and Democrats, or advocates of big government and those of limited government, or blacks and whites. Instead they will be seen as something much more fundamental: the birth pangs of a new version of America -- one that not only looked different from the country it displaced but also occupied a different, more mature place in the world.

To those savants, the crux of the Obama years won't be so much about the man who occupied the Oval Office and his differences with his opponents on Capitol Hill. Rather, it will involve the irresistible demographic shifts that made the election of a black president possible, and the relentless global economic transformation that constrained his options once he assumed the office.

A century from now, it will be obvious that Obama's tenure marked a turning point in the power relations among the races. The color line had been irretrievably smashed by his ascent. America had to negotiate a new compact on race, color and class. The New America that Obama's presidency heralded was browner, blacker and younger than the America from which it evolved.

And though whites continued to enjoy a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth and political clout, the emerging leaders in politics and business were more colorful, too. To our future historians, the notion that there was something controversial about a black man getting elected will seem as ludicrous and quaint as the idea of black and white drinking fountains appears to young people today.