KEY POINTS:
This week someone innocently asked if I was excited about the US election today.
I stared them down with the intensity of a kamikaze pilot already strapped into the plane and replied: "If George Clooney had asked for my phone number and he then called to tell me I'd won the Nobel Prize - in every single category - I would not be more excited than I am today."
The acquaintance turned and ran. I've noticed a lot of people are fleeing from me lately.
When I handed in my US ballot at my local post office a few weeks ago, I made all three clerks at the window pat it for good luck. They complied but I noticed they quietly stepped back from the counter about a metre in case they needed to protect themselves.
The only thing scarier than a disenfranchised American in New Zealand is a cautiously ecstatic one.
While it's true we get competent news analysis of the US in our papers here, what you can't feel first hand is the overwhelming passion behind this race.
There is a raw excitement that may have been there for leaders like John Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but without doubt this is unlike anything I've experienced in my lifetime.
I have been waiting for eight long, dark years to be able to write a column that can talk about what's right with America instead of what's wrong with America.
I need to wake up tomorrow morning and hear that the United States has chosen to create a better history.
Under the disastrous administration of George W. Bush, America has become a nation I can hardly recognise.
We have become the land of Guantanamo, secret rendition, illegal wire tapping and of hooded men standing on boxes with electrical wires strung along their arms. This isn't my America. This isn't the promise of all Americans.
The editors of Esquire magazine wrote: "To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next President."
We have almost forgotten that America's biggest export in almost every field of endeavour - whether it is microchips or movies - has always been its potential, its promise.
That is why when Barack Obama stood up in front of Ohioans for his final week's "closing argument" and spoke about losing our sense of common higher purpose and asking Americans to come together to build that better history, the promise of his words may have sealed the deal for this election far more than any economic policy.
As conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks commented, most politicians need to woo their voters but in this race it feels like it is the people who are hungering for Obama's affection. They need him.
Tonight we may find out if he has indeed sealed the deal for voters who have forgotten how to believe in their nation again. I am one of them. For me change is no emaciated slogan of the moment, it is a prayer.
I may not be alone. In the last few weeks, after 21 months of relentless campaigning, 100,000 people still came out to hear Barack Obama speak in St Louis and another 100,000 in Denver.
Obama's campaign is pulling in more contributions than any other in US history, usually in small parcels of individual donors. Millions are standing in three and four-hour early voting lines just to guarantee their voice will count on the day.
The truth is, I am afraid. I am afraid to put so much hope in just one man. Since the day Barack Obama won the primary in Iowa, my secret threefold prayer has been: let him get the nomination, don't let him get shot and don't let him become Jimmy Carter once he's in office.
If an Obama presidency is smothered by the mess he will inherit (and the presidency could well be for whomever takes office next) at least he will have given us something America desperately craves today - the possibility of renewal. I believe they call that hope.
When Barack Obama came out of nowhere to win the Iowa caucus on a cold winter day those many months ago, he said: "They say this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high." Little did any of us know what a vital marker of the American consciousness those two short sentences would represent today.
I will be awake most of the night tonight watching the states get colour coded in red and blue. But all I will be thinking of is how proud Martin Luther King would have been of his dream right now.
* www.traceybarnett.co.nz
