In the 2008 political season, it was hard not to hear the sound of America’s racial history humming with the tune of the Civil War era. The primary elections smacked of subtle hangovers from the 1860’s racial passions of Union states, border states, and Confederate southern states. The Economist editorial (June 7, 08) captured the more positive mood: “For a country whose past is disfigured by slavery, segregation and unequal voting rights, this is a moment to celebrate. America’s history of re-inventing and perfecting itself has acquired another page.” But, lurching in the psycho-social of the Civil War Southerners – then and now – was the moribund “Negro question”, that is, the discomfort of the “redneck” and ageing “white traditionalists” ever suspicious of African-Americans (black folks) mingling in a common orbit with them. If the slaves were freed, they used to argue, would a white man’s life, and especially “a white woman’s honour” be safe? The depth that Obama is bridging today, as the highly likely 44th United States president, is a puzzling chasm wrapped in self-doubts. Yet despite the racial twists and turns, Obama was, by far, the most historically fresh and inspiring of all the candidates – both Republican and Democratic. He was also the most articulate, and inspired. You’d discern that he’d taken a measure of the racial landscape, and especially of the characters shifting, sniffing and scrambling in it for their party’s nomination. Naturally his skin had grown thick and resilient in anticipation of moods and eruptions that border on racial discomforts. He understood the sources of white fears: not only was his own mother a white woman who loved him dearly, but also the grandparents who raised him. The African father disappeared much too early from the son’s life. Many whites empathized with Obama’s umbilical connection though the white single parent, but subliminal doubts continue to linger in their psyche. Besides the nurturing, Obama’s natural born qualities are solid. His gifted tenored resonance, his remarkable intellect, and his vision for a broken nation needing redemption – all joined at the hip to raise him head and shoulders above the competing pack. He was a tough act to beat. At the onset, the opponents who discerned such qualities in him bowed out gratefully and gracefully, and made room. Hilary Clinton, truly, did him a favour by hanging in and hanging him on the ropes to complete the rounds. Ask the legendary, sting-like-a-bee, heavy weight Mohammed Ali (1960s): Champions have bruises to show. Not only did they look the visionary part, but essentially they lived it. Good fighters come in all sexes. Together with her trainer/husband - Bill Clinton, while it might appear that they hurt Obama’s chances, the tough woman toughened him for the decisive showdown against the weary warrior, John McCain. The best things that ever, lately, happened to Obama were George W. Bush; Hillary Clinton; and John McCain, in that order. First, George Bush (a most favourite son with a president father to boot) had so estranged the U.S. presidency, and in that taint taken the entire nation to the cleaners, and dealt “the knock-out blow to our vanishing liberties” (according to novelist/essayist Gore Vidal, in his 2002 book, subtitled How we got to be so hated). The junior Bush seemed to embody, with Swiss precision, Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s truism that a man must be judged by the content in his character, and not the skin colour. Mrs Clinton, in turn, had deployed her arsenal, her president husband, her steely nerve, and still come short. In the bouts against Obama, she elevated his standing and stamina in the public eye. John McCain’s multitudinous experiences seemed to be the very things that repelled Americans today. There’s such a vengeful method in the recurring administrative failures, both domestically and abroad, that “experience” had lost its glow, and become expressive of that double despair. What’s new? The voters wanted to know.