Haroon Siddiqui on Obama

In two days, George W. Bush will be gone, not a moment too soon. Out the window will go his policies.

The resounding victory of Barack Hussein Obama was a reaction to the war on terror, war on Iraq, war on Afghanistan, war on the American constitution and the Geneva Conventions, and war on regulations of the financial markets.

This is not to take anything away from Obama's historic achievements. Overcoming the racial barrier was only one of them.

In going from being a black candidate to one who happened to be black, he transformed America. There's no more talk of the White House becoming a Black House with a cabbage patch, but rather of the first black family moving into the house built by slave labour.

Obama is a highly educated man of rare talent, who has put intelligent debate back at the heart of American democracy that had made a virtue of ignorance.

He is calm, dignified and full of grace, even to his tormentors, including John McCain and Hillary Clinton (who claimed that she, not he, represented "hard-working Americans, white Americans.")

But Obama cannot possibly fulfill the expectations he has raised, in America and abroad. He cannot walk on water. Nor are all his prescriptions perfect. But he has indeed ushered in an era of hope.