Last updated at 1:31 AM on 07th November 2008 Richard Littlejohn This had been a spectacular victory; he'd won big even in areas of the country which had never voted for his party before. A washed-up, discredited government had been consigned to oblivion. His simple, compelling message of 'change' had helped him assemble an historic, all-conquering coalition - white, black, young, old, liberal, conservative. It was a new dawn. His was a young country, whose time had come. Politics would never be the same again. Things can only get better. But enough of Tony Blair. What about Barack Obama? Scroll down for more Is Barack Obama America's Tony Blair? I'm not trying to belittle the significance of the election of America's first black president. Nor am I in any way trying to rain on his parade by pointing out that he would have won even if he had been white. Don't underestimate the American capacity for innovation and reinvention. Race was never as big an issue in this election as some have tried to make out. Colin Powell would almost certainly have been elected President eight years ago, had his wife let him run and had he been able to choose between offers from both the Republicans and the Democrats to be their candidate. America is a completely different nation from the one I first visited almost 40 years ago. When I arrived in Detroit, in the wake of coast-to-coast race riots, the fires were still smouldering - both literally and metaphorically. They had just put a man on the moon, but the idea that they would one day put a black man in the White House was unthinkable. Only a dyed-in-the-wool racist could fail to be enthralled and inspired by Obama's ascent to the most powerful office in the world. Tuesday night saw America at its very best - from Obama's uplifting acceptance address to John McCain's gracious, magnanimous concession. Except in Redneck Central, Obama's pigmentation was never going to count against him, as his early triumph in milky-white Iowa demonstrated. The only people who ever seriously tried to play the race card were the Clintons. To see Billy Bob - America's self-styled 'first black President', don't forget - reduced to trawling the southern states like the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan was one of the great joys of the whole campaign. I'm not going to deny that there are still disturbing racial fault-lines in some parts of the country, but nationally they are dwindling into insignificance. Obama exploited the new mood of melting pot USA to perfection. To hark back briefly to 1960s Detroit, Motown Records defined itself not as the 'Sound of Black America', but as the 'Sound of Young America'. In doing so, it broke soul and Obama has done something similar. He presented himself brilliantly, not as a black candidate, but as a young candidate, untainted by the sins of his elders - both Democratic and Republican. Here's what I wrote in January, at the start of the primary season: 'Younger voters can't stomach the prospect of yet another Bush or Clinton in the White House. Hillary running on a "change" ticket is about as convincing as Ulrika Jonsson standing as a born-again virgin. 'So that leaves Obama, a man about whom we know everything and nothing ... Obama is being hailed as the new Kennedy. But what if he turns out to be the new Teddy Kennedy? 'Choosing Obama would be, like a second marriage, a triumph of hope over experience.' And that's where we are today. Americans have tried experience, and look where that's got them - bogged down in two unpopular foreign wars, a triple-trillion-dollar deficit and the worst economic crisis since the Wall Street Crash. When I came home from my most recent visit to America in early September, after the conventions, McCain still looked the more likely winner. But then came the Biblical collapse of the financial temple. The old man had nothing new to say. The young pretender wisely said nothing - probably because he had nothing to say, either. Picture-perfect: The image of Barack Obama celebrating with his young family bears resemblances to the early days of Tony Blair's leadership Despite that, the Americans have chosen to give youth its head. We still know little about him, other than he is a brilliant campaigner and cool under pressure - no mean quality. While Gordon Brown insists that this is 'no time for a novice', the Americans have concluded it's No Country For Old Men. They've decided to take a punt. This won't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Chris Tarrant version, contestants who have blundered their way to £16,000 call it a day when faced with a difficult question. Better to go home with something. In the U.S. version, nine times out of ten, contestants who stand to lose anything up to a quarter of a million dollars, who have run out of lifelines and don't have a clue about the answer, smile and say: 'I came here with nothing, I've had a great evening, so what the heck, let's go for it' - even if it means they guess wrong and go home empty-handed. No hard feelings. And that's precisely what the U.S. electorate has done. Like Vegas gamblers, they've staked everything on black. If Obama does turn out to be Teddy, not John Fitzgerald, Kennedy, they can get rid of him in four years' time. If everything goes pear-shaped very quickly, there's always the mid-term House elections to put a brake on him. That's how a vibrant, representative democracy works, unlike our own elective dictatorship. In many ways, Obama is not the revolutionary candidate - he's the quiet-life option. Americans are tired of the bitter divisions of the Bush years and long for something gentler, less confrontational. I worked out he was going to win when I received an email from a good friend of mine in Florida. An oilman-turned-realtor, Dick has been a Republican all his life, living in a county which hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1944. This time, he said, he was supporting Obama. It wasn't just that he thought that McCain might croak in office and they'd be left at the mercy of the entertaining, but scary Sarah Palin. It was that he simply couldn't face the prospect of another four years of rancour, of partisan paralysis between a Democrat Congress and a Republican President, another four years of squabbling and inaction. Time to give the boy a go and hope for the best. Quiet-life option: Americans are tired of the bitter divisions of the Bush years and long for something gentler, less confrontational Worst case, Obama goes down the path of high-tax welfarism and protectionism and turns recession into Armageddon. Best case, he governs for all Americans, which will come as a great disappointment to his new best friends in Europe, who think that somehow he's going to remake America into a cross between Sweden and Islington. Reading some of the coverage and watching the BBC, you'd think It Was The Guardian Wot Won It. Sorry, but with their bigoted blinkers, they've largely got the U.S. wrong up until now, and my guess is they're about to get it wrong again. Whether or not he pulls out of Iraq, how will they respond if Obama carries out his promise to invade Pakistan's tribal regions in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden? And he's already said he won't allow Iran to become a nuclear power - which may mean sanctioning an Israeli attack or ordering the U.S. air force to take out President I'm A Dinner Jacket's nuclear capability. Where will the Not In My Name crowd stand then? Oh, and perhaps they haven't noticed, their hero is a supporter of the death penalty. Which brings us back to where we came in. Like Obama, Tony Blair was elected on a wave of euphoria, with a huge parliamentary majority and a largely uncritical media cheering him on. Like Obama, he followed a tired, worn-out administration, which had utterly lost the confidence of the public. He, too, offered hope and 'change' and, unlike Obama, had the advantage of inheriting a sound, booming economy, not a basket case. And he blew it. Blair is now as big a hate figure on the Left as George W. Bush. For now, Obama is their darling. He will get the benefit of the doubt. His mistakes and shortcomings will be glossed over and his failures to deliver blamed on obstructionism by 'racists'. But despite talk of a landslide and a record turn-out, Obama's victory was wide but shallow. With two tied States still to report, he has polled only a million or so more votes than Bush did in 2004, and was helped by disillusioned Republicans either switching sides - more in hope than expectation, like my friend - or staying at home. America hasn't changed as fundamentally as some would have us believe. For instance, in Florida and California, both won by Obama, voters overwhelmingly rejected a parallel proposal on the ballot to legalise gay marriage. It is a fragile coalition, which won't hold if there's a rerun of the Great Depression and the Republicans get their act together over the next couple of years. Gordon Brown keeps banging on about this being a 'global crisis which started in America', while conveniently ignoring his own culpability in Britain being worse-equipped than most to cope with the downturn. But if the world is to get out of this financial mess, the solution can only start in America, too. Leaving aside the Russians, the Iranians and Al Qaeda, the economy, stupid, is going to be Obama's biggest challenge. We must all pray that America's first black President doesn't turn out to be this generation's Tony Blair.Let's hope that Obama doesn't turn into America's Tony Blair...
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