MORNING in AMERICA

With glorious hindsight, one can of course see that it was perfectly inevitable. John McCain’s campaign was a disaster. The mass of contradictions weren’t all his fault but he couldn’t begin to bridge them. He was running against his own party whose leader for eight years had been the least equipped and most maladroit and – which does not necessarily follow – the most unpopular chief executive in almost everyone’s memory.

McCain could not develop a theme, Barack Obama already having annexed change and hope, so he cast about and appeared indecisive and bumbling. In settling on questioning Obama’s fitness for office – the age-old technique of the GOP – McCain again and again asked the electorate to look at his opponent rather than himself but this only helped Obama more than it hindered him. Those fearful Republican voters talking of Socialism sounded like paranoiacs.

In the third television debate with his young opponent, McCain looked tired and old and, as tired, old men do, he repeated himself and waffled. His pick of a running mate was a nine-day wonder, filling in the gaps in enthusiasm that he himself had left in the party’s core support but alienating the middle ground he needed if he was going to be competitive and neutralizing his attack on Obama’s inexperience.

But Obama was never going to win merely by default. His victory is positive and constructive because it reached far beyond his party’s base – and most significantly he too barely ever mentioned his party. He was on a mission and the mission drew adherents in ever-increasing numbers from the very outset. The long bruising struggle with Senator Clinton only honed and focussed his appeal.

His specific commitments have been few because he is a realist. His inheritance is as inauspicious as any in-coming head of state has faced since Roosevelt. He knew perfectly well that promises he wouldn’t be able to keep would quickly tarnish his value. At this moment, he is the most inspirational figure on the world’s stage since Mandela and he knows it and he knows that the real hard work lies ahead. His presidency will fail on many fronts because that is the nature of politics but if, like Mandela, Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, he can rise above those failings, he will leave office as beloved as those men did.

The astonishing aspect, I think, is not really that he is black, or rather “of colour” as they say, in his case more appropriate because he is of mixed race. One of the precious few unalloyed achievements of his immediate predecessor is that, on his watch, nobody white represented the USA’s foreign policy, a quite remarkable occurrence that could not have been anticipated even after Andrew Young’s showy but short participation in the Carter administration. Of course Obama’s coronation is a defining moment in America’s story because of his colour and the history behind his ascent. As a contributor to last night’s coverage on the BBC pointed out, the first sixteen US Presidents could have owned Obama.

On the other hand his election does not say that there will be other presidents in the foreseeable future who are not WASP men. Margaret Thatcher’s entry into 10 Downing Street has not advanced, as far as can be judged, the prospects for a second woman prime minister in Britain, though it may have helped the cause of women leaders elsewhere. I hardly expect in my lifetime to see a president or a prime minister who is atheist or disabled or gay or even Jewish, despite a Jew (Michael Howard) having recently led the British Tory Party.

No, the astonishing aspect is that it’s the serious guy rather than the affable guy who won. (On the basis of this dichotomy, I anticipated a McCain victory in this blog on September 14th – Sit Down. You're Rocking the Boat – before the global financial crisis that McCain played so impetuously and unconvincingly). Obama patently has a fine intellect and the intellectual resource to field and answer unexpected questions fearlessly and frankly. He gives full rather than glib responses. He can be wryly witty but he is primarily a grave and dedicated politician. McCain and Palin appeared (separately) on Saturday Night Live but Obama did not. All of that, I felt, militated against his chances of success. Hitherto, the genial guy – Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr – always beat the earnest guy – Carter, Mondale, Bush Sr, Dole, Gore, Kerry. But something has changed and now McCain’s winsomeness – and his concession speech was a model of grace and modesty – actually seems to have alienated elements of the Republican Party who want more attack dog and less fair dealing. If that means Governor Palin survives and thrives in the reduced GOP, so much the better. Four years of the Obama presidency will convince many of the more thoughtful Republican voters that their fears that Obama was Socialist or Moslem or a friend of terrorists or somehow “un-American” were misplaced. Enough Americans have seen the state of things and embraced seriousness as a political philosophy that suits them to give Obama the strongest mandate since LBJ’s in 1964. And, always accepting that LBJ is not a good precedent, being a good man brought down by uncontrollable events, one still may dare to believe that a lot will have to have gone wrong for Obama to fail to win four more years.

Incidentally, can anyone answer this: does history record who exactly it was that fixed it for Barack Obama, then a novice senator, to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic Party National Convention in Boston in 2004? That creative and far-sighted person surely paved the way for America's wonderful leap of faith today.