KEY POINTS:
While it has been splendid watching the triumph of Barack Obama, the worry for New Zealand is his attitude to free trade.
New Zealand has had to claw its way back into the warm corridors of American power after offending so damagingly in the 1980s.
And next year
talks are due to begin between New Zealand and its partners in this exercise, Chile, Brunei and Singapore, and the United States, which should lead to a free-trade agreement between us all.
The question now is, will they begin at all? What is Obama's attitude to free trade?
Democrats, especially Obama's constituency, are deeply suspicious of trade liberalisation. They think it means jobs down the toilet.
Obama's constituency is very much the left of his party and on the campaign he often demanded a renegotiation of Nafta's structure, threatening to pull out if Canada and Mexico did not play ball.
Well, the campaign is one thing, governing is another.
Part of Obama's genius is that we don't know what he really wants to do on a lot of things.
Can you, for example, tell me what he is going to do in Iraq? Or with the financial crisis? This is a man who keeps a lot of powder dry.
What we do know is that the man is an internationalist.
Tim Groser, the National MP, our free-trade negotiations guru believes the talks will go ahead.
They will be tough, he says, but the transpacific agreement ``will most certainly be done'.
As we ease out of the credit crisis, Obama will have to adopt a leadership role in international trade liberalisation. New Zealand and its partners in these imminent talks are, Groser says, ``a nodal point of growth for what will eventually become a free-trade area across the entire Asia Pacific region'.
``Obama is an economically literate man. I've read so much about Obama. Is he going to continue with the talks? Most certainly, he will.
``He's going to meet prime ministers and presidents and every one of them is going to ask him to take leadership on free trade and the Doha Round and they're going to want reform of the international monetary system. ``If he doesn't respond, he's going to be as unpopular as any other American president. He's not going to want that.'
Groser has no worries.
