In the lead up to election day on November 4th, with opinion polls in the United States granting a healthy lead to the Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama over his Republican rival John McCain, epic change is in the air. Barring a last minute miracle, the very image and identity of the US is up for reformulation with the election of the 47-year-old Senator from Illinois who catapulted from relative obscurity into a world figure within a span of months.

In purely Presidential systems of government pioneered by the US model, individual personalities of heads of state have always held a larger-than-life importance of their own compared to the parliamentary form. Elections in the former are organised along party lines, but the contest is more often than not determined by voters’ perceptions of the individuals slugging it out.

The tradition of face-to-face debates between the two main contenders, which began to be televised since 1960, has made US Presidential races appear more like civilised boxing encounters between two trained athletes rather than institutional ‘party vs. party’ competitions. The criteria of choice for the American voters vary from one election to the other, but the one constant is the assessment of whether candidate A is superior to candidate B in leadership, governance and ‘Presidential material’.

Given this personality-centric and image-soaked dynamic of US Presidential elections, the likely victory of Obama in 2008 is all the more remarkable for its deep institutional and structural significance. According to intellectuals like Samuel Huntington, American identity has for centuries been defined by its White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites, who combined the best European liberal values of personal freedom with the power of markets to create a great ‘land of opportunities’.

The election of a person of colour to the highest office of such a land is an earthquake of sorts for older Americans like Huntington, whose European ancestral roots and racial attachments have been challenged by much younger post-Baby Boomer generation Americans who form the backbone of the Obama phenomenon.

The key point of transformation in American society that is propelling Obama to the White House is a new wave of liberalism among voters of the 18-to-30-age bracket. Their values are broad enough to reject the narrowness and colour prejudices of WASP liberalism, which used to be the ideological bedrock of the country. Their sensibilities are more attuned to accepting the inherently unjust and discriminatory truth of WASP social stability.   

College-going or recently graduated Americans campaigned with a rare fervour for Obama’s primary nomination against Senator Hilary Clinton earlier this year and showed a capacity for involvement in public affairs that had dimmed with increasing levels of prosperity and materialism. The Obama camp’s grassroots fundraising drive during the primaries was a unique participative strategy that tapped into the energies and aspirations of young Americans and earned handsome dividends against the shop-worn big business-leaning Clinton camp. It is only fair to conclude that Clinton’s loss had less to do with sexism and more with her failure to see potential in young America that was coming into its own.

So decisive has the age factor become in the current election season that a controversy has erupted over alleged attempts of Republican-run states like Georgia, Indiana and Florida to complicate voter registration requirements and deny Obama’s young and poor faithful the chance to cast their ballots on November 4th. What the new generation of Americans have done is to frighten the wits out of the established social elites who had never assumed that a majority of white Americans would choose a ‘Black Man’.

For Obama to have grown into an electable option, a great deal of social churning had to happen beforehand in the US. In hindsight, the platform for his advent was being laid through steady generational change of over two decades. Obama’s likely election is thus not simply the ‘new’ giving way to the ‘old’ in terms of the yawning gap between his age and McCain’s, but also in the sense of underlying demographic and value shifts.

Sceptics of Obama’s chances at the hustings, both abroad and in the US, were caught in a time warp and are now waking up to a new reality. Their stereotype of America as a racist society with European legacies is being systematically disabused by Obama’s success. Many rooters for McCain in the world media nursed a disbelief in their minds that America as a society can ever change from its WASP roots. The vision of Obama taking oath of office as the 44th President in a country that was “kept for the white race” (former President Theodore Roosevelt) was science fiction to those who did not read the script of cumulatively gathering change.   

As per a report in The International Herald Tribune, the panic-stricken McCain campaign has decided to wage a “gloves off” struggle, using all means available to stop the Obama juggernaut from running past the finish line. Key to this baring of knuckles is appealing to small town white Americans, famed for their conservatism, that Obama is not “one of us.” Yet, miraculously, even in the predominantly white Rust Belt states of the US like Ohio and West Virginia, the message has failed to prevent the erosion of Republican support among voters facing severe economic distress.      

To credit Obama’s late surge in popularity solely to the worsening financial crisis misses the social breeze of change that has been slowly percolating into the nerves of America. While race is still an agenda item for the McCain diehards and has not completely vanished in voter calculations, the fact is that this impermeable glass ceiling has been shattered by Obama’s emergence as the frontrunner. His elevation to favourite is a reflection of fundamental movement in the way Americans visualise themselves as a multi-cultural rainbow nation that is comfortable with a person of African descent being very much “one of them.”          
      
In 1968, one of the victims of the fragmented legacy of the old American social order, Robert F. Kennedy, said that “things are moving so fast in race relations, a Negro could be President in forty years.” His prediction is on the verge of fulfilment in 2008, as is the observation that the social relations and fabric of the US are in constant evolution.

Barack Obama is no revolutionary who can morph America into a just and equitable society overnight. Rather, he is a symbol of evolutionary change that has crept in and matured over time. His likely election as President may not augur instant upturns in the American political system or foreign policy, but will usher in greater reconciliation within American society and heal the wounds that have forever sundered the American soul. When the euphoria dies down and he settles down to run the gargantuan enterprise of government, disappointment and even disillusionment cannot be ruled out.

At present though, America is ready and waiting for Obama.