KEY POINTS:
Sometimes an election result has been so widely and keenly anticipated that a surprise scarcely bears thinking of. So it is with this United States presidential election. To all intents and purposes the race was all over bar the voting several weeks ago. Barack Obama offers Americans and the world a refreshing new spirit in the White House.
He presents himself as much more than an Afro-American. His politics, he says, are post-racial and post-partisan. The "change" that has been his campaign theme cannot be summarised in a set of policies or even a coherent philosophy. He can express it only as different from the way things have been done by the Bush Administration, which would be change enough for most.
The world can write on the clean slate of Barack Obama almost anything desired. A more inclusive leadership of international affairs? Check. A serious and sustained attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict? Check. A collegial approach to regulating the financial system. A revival of efforts to liberalise global trade rules.
Mr Obama has not said much to encourage hope on all of these fronts; indeed his opponent, John McCain, is the more strongly committed to the last, world trade liberalisation. Mr McCain also shaped up as a very good President. He was not always able to appear at his best fighting against the odds but he was not, as Mr Obama painted him, George W. Bush reincarnate.
Mr McCain is a Republican of a very different stamp from the conservative core of his party and has been prepared to defy it. Throughout his long Senate career he has had the courage to speak unpopular truths when necessary and tell an audience what it does not want to hear.
Mr Obama will need that capacity at times. He has already demonstrated it in one vital respect. Mr Obama opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, when that was not the majority view in America. Iraq has faded in the election debate but one of the first tasks of the new President will be to engage world support in a solution that allows the military effort to be diverted to Afghanistan, where it should always have been.
It has been called the greatest election in recent history. Certainly none since the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 has represented a generational change to compare with it. And the record does not suggest the Kennedy campaign attracted crowds and adulation on the scale that Mr Obama has done. The numbers he has inspired to work for him and the money they have raised for his campaign eclipsed anything American politics has seen.
As a campaign predominantly of young people it is also the first to exploit the internet to its fullest. The election's liveliest dimension was on the web where sites for and against Mr Obama battled around the clock and produced some of the cleverest promotional techniques imaginable.
All this made Mr McCain's age and lack of internet savvy an impossible hurdle. Against a conventional candidate he would have had a chance. But he was swimming against a tide of change. His party's attempt to meet that mood by putting up a woman for Vice-President backfired on him. Sarah Palin's inadequacies only accentuated his age and its risks in office.
In the end America has proved it can elect a black President. Blacks will expect much of Mr Obama and he must make a difference for them. With the inspiration his election provides, he must help black communities find collective solutions to their housing, education, crime and drug problems.
His ethnic communities, his country and the world expect big things from this slender young man whose soaring oratory, faultless manner and calm determination have sustained a long campaign. Soon his harder work begins.
