KEY POINTS:
It has taken two long years. More than a billion dollars has been spent. The greatest mobilization of voters America has seen has occurred. And the country has chosen between the five offered from both sides; for the Republicans a cocksure Preacher, a Mormon multi-millionair and a grizzled war hero. And the Democrat's woman whose priviledged connections once made her seem unstoppable and the upstart eloquent black man who arose suddenly , alone, out of Chicago.
Barack Obama, the former community activist and law professor who has never held executive office , has leapt into the White House carrying the better hopes of millions of Americans and millions more from the world outside. Could he be more different to what has gone before? A liberal, a redistributor, a man of colour - as the more precious like to say. A man he wants to talk without conditions to his county's enemies and one who sees and wishes to right the anguish his country has caused its friends.
His are younger shoulders. All hope he can bare what the millions who took a leap of great faith and went for the untested have asked of this man who promises a new era in an America quietly disgusted with the recent past; its sapping foreign wars that seem to have no end in sight, icons that have crossed generations such as Ford and General Motors on their knees, the obscenity of the richest messing recklessly with the livelihoods of the ordinary and still being bailed out with unimaginable amounts of public money, a middle class going backwards and still poorer one beneath, impoverished, growing and forgotten.
He is a man who lived for much of his life outside of America and its mainstream. There was a boyhood in Indonesia. Later he lived in Hawaii – under the wing of his much loved (white) grandmother whom he lost to cancer on the very eve of his greatest achievement. The son of a casually absent Kenyan academic and wandering, probing anthropologist mother, he has been shaped better than any President in our lifetimes to view America more as the world outside looks upon it. Not for him the Bush rituals of rancher's boots and pickup trucks. Nor blind acceptance of the God and guns credo that runs deep within the small town interior.
He will want to America to do better, much, much better, in the world's eyes.
If Obama stays true to his promises, he will ask the generals, the day after he is sworn in, to begin the ending of America's war in Iraq with the aim of withdrawal of forces by the northern summer of 2010 -about 16 months away. Private Bradley Coleman, 24 of Martinsville, Virginia died at an Iraq airfield late on Monday. His death took the number of Americans killed in Gorge Bush's war to 4190. The country has lost an awful lot of skin in Iraq – but now appears to be winning. The New York Times reported, also on Monday, that the casualty rate was the lowest in four years. Obama opposed the troop surge which is widely credited with that result. If the new President is not to now snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, we must expect some elasticity in his timetable.
An unknown and clear concern for smaller nations such as New Zealand and Australia which must rely on access to the vast American market to sell their exports is Barack Obama's seemingly ambivalent attitude to extending free trade. America's nearest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are troubled by his promise to abrogate the 15 year old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if the junior partners refuse to negotiate changes that will be better for jobs within the US. He recognizes that many people are disenchanted with the excesses of globalization and has warned that American companies which shift jobs overseas will face tax penalties.
Nobody can fail to be struck in Manhattan by the gulf between the country's very richest and it's poorest. The homeless, lying on street corners in rags, tugs the hearts of newcomers. The streets buzz at night with supremely lowly paid foreign workers on bikes delivering restaurant prepared dinners to the legions of comfortably off. Others balancing buckets and vacuum cleaners pedal furiously between lousy cleaning jobs. All look worn out. Obama's explanation that he intends the tax cuts he will give to 150 million workers to begin the redistribution of wealth seems un challengeable in a nation where the top one per cent of the richest control nearly 40 per cent of the wealth. And the bottom 40 per cent of people have just 1 per cent.
America has made a momentous decision with Obama's election. And it is at the edge, now, of a transformational era – within and to the outside world. All the more incredible because with George's Bush's re-election four years ago , it seemed that the conservative, war mongering Republicans were even more entrenched. Who would have thought back then that a poised, articulate and graceful young black man would march up and declare enough.
Or that millions of Americans would listen and agree.
