KEY POINTS:
There is nothing as liberating as trust. The miracle in America on Wednesday was obviously liberating for the black population because Barack Obama has been trusted to govern, but it must feel even more liberating for the whites.
They have been freed of a terrible self-distrust.
Until the
election they didn't know they could put a black man in the White House. Individually, the majority knew they could, but they were not entirely sure they were a majority.
The moving event the world witnessed was a people's discovery that they are better than they realised.
And with that realisation comes another: that the people they have trusted are going to respond to the trust as any decent person does.
President Obama is going to be fine. He will have his allotment of strengths and weaknesses and make his share of mistakes but he will be conscientious, capable, responsible and pursue his view of the national interest.
It suddenly feels offensive to write that sentence. Who would have ever suggested less? Well, maybe a noisy few at John McCain's concession speech but not the candidate himself.
He had been as moved as anyone at the hope Obama had brought to "millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed they had little at stake or little influence". It must have been hard to campaign against one side of your heart.
Everyone who has spent any time in the United States has been struck by the social divide. Two years ago I took my first drive around the south.
After a good look at New Orleans in its post-Katrina prisoners' dilemma, I meandered through Louisiana and into Mississippi. Ever a sucker for history, I stopped into a couple of restored antebellum estates and was shown over the homesteads by women who were keen to tell me the life stories of the previous owners but said almost nothing of the slaves.
You would never know they had been there unless you tugged on an ornate cord hanging in the corner of some finely furnished rooms. It rang a cowbell on a back veranda.
Memory pulled me places that had been in the news during the civil rights movement. At the University of Mississippi, where Obama and McCain had one of their televised debates last month, I could find no memorial to James Meredith, whose attempt to enrol in 1962 prompted a riot that caught President John F. Kennedy's attention.
In Alabama I headed for Selma, where Martin Luther King jnr had begun the march to Birmingham. The distinctive arched bridge that state troopers barricaded to beat up the marchers and disperse them with teargas is still there.
At the information centre an elderly white man was on the desk. I browsed in the tourist brochures and souvenirs for a while before summoning the courage to ask about the town's most notable moment.
"Yes," he said, "come back here." And there was a whole room devoted to books and pamphlets and displays of newspaper cuttings and photographs of those dramatic days in 1965.
The old man told me he had a pharmacy in those days and the business had suffered some because he had supported the voting rights of the negroes, as they were then called.
Quite a number of whites supported their demands, he said. They only wanted the right to register without the loaded "literacy" tests that local registration boards used to impose on blacks. They practically had to be constitutional scholars.
Soon after that bloody Sunday at Selma the "freedom march" proceeded unimpeded to the state capital. But the events that day had attracted national and worldwide attention and led directly to Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act, enforced by federal marshals.
Selma today is not exactly a poster for progress since. King's statue stands in dusty streets of derelict housing and listless life. It is a place the educated leave and the problems remain.
The white civic leader who called King a 'coon' and a communist in 1965 publicly recanted subsequently but somehow survived in office until just a year or so ago. They say that on the days postal ballots were sent out, his people would follow the mail, steal the papers and when blacks turned up to vote they'd find the register showed they already had.
Obama has a great deal to do and Americans know better than the rest of us that the presidency is not as powerful inside the country as it is outside. Nothing he will do might surpass the lift he has given his country simply by being elected.
Television caught the tears on Jesse Jackson's face. Black and white, every face was rapt in the discovery of trust. America is going to be better than ever.
