Mary Dejevsky: With a rebuke, and a call to unity, the great cleansing begins

Few public utterances can have been more keenly anticipated by more people in more places than the inaugural address of President – President, now, how does that sound? – Barack Obama.

What America, and the rest of the world, heard, ringing out across Washington's packed National Mall, was a call, not to arms, but to unity, to responsibility and to good old-fashioned, unglamorous, work. It was a speech consciously suffused with remembered cadences: from Abraham Lincoln, through FDR, JFK and Martin Luther King. It was also a repudiation – delicately executed, but without compromise – of a great deal that his predecessor had stood for.

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The streak of ruthlessness Mr Obama had applied to such effect during his campaign was much in evidence here. From George Bush's ideological absolutism, through his easy resort to military force, through the limits he placed on scientific research, to his catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina and unquestioning embrace of market solutions, the new President rejected them all. His eve-of- inauguration visit to injured servicemen at Washington's Walter Reed army medical centre was the visit Mr Bush never made.

In a way, the whole Inauguration Day, with its established and measured choreography, was a cleansing. For the first time in a generation, neither disappointment nor contention tainted the change of power. And the atmosphere could scarcely have been more different from eight years before. In 2001, the sparse crowds were sombre, deterred by the election controversy and the threat of protests. Oppressive clouds never lifted; rain lashed the parade. The Bushes almost fled the last yards to the White House. For the Obamas, the sun shone; the sky was a cloudless winter blue. Ecstatic, colourful, multi-ethnic crowds thronged the route.

By their very determination to be there, these people embodied the spirit of the new President's message: the twin themes of unity and freedom. For the world at large, these words would have an all-American ring spoken by any President. They acquired a particularly ideological tinge in the canon of George Bush. But from the country's first black – or more accurately, mixed-race – President, a man who made a point of swearing the oath as Barack Hussein Obama, they took on particular significance.

Mr Obama's unity is not just about national solidarity, but about equality and harmony between races. As he noted, a mere 60 years before, his father might have been refused service at a Washington restaurant. What he forbore to say was that in the American south, such a colour-bar existed for longer, persisting in practice long after it was outlawed. And freedom, to a black American – whether directly descended from slaves or not – means only one thing: emancipation; from slavery, yes, but from ingrained and insidious discrimination as well.

From now on, the daily pictures of the black First Family will illustrate beyond doubt that colour and race are no barrier to becoming even Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful country in the world. That message will reverberate around the world. The very fact that Mr Obama was elected has already given hope, and ambition, to young people from ethnic minority families in Britain and elsewhere. If there is one video-clip that could change expectations everywhere, it is that of Mr Obama swearing the oath of office beneath the Stars and Stripes, surrounded by his family.

At this time of high emotion and almost infinite aspiration, however, it is also important to realise what Barack Obama's arrival in the White House does not say about America. It does not say that all Americans are equal or even have equal opportunities. It says that one particular American had the persuasive gifts and the qualifications to compete for the highest office and prevail. It says that, in the league of white America's concerns, economic self-interest – to put it crudely, the pocket book – trumped even so visible and deep-rooted a consideration as race. Voters judged Mr Obama the candidate best equipped to address their anxiety.

But this does not mean that America's complexes about race have been overcome. You can be sure that the moment the new President puts a foot wrong, there will be those who will not hesitate to invoke race. More than a few mis-steps, and there will be mutterings about race and capacity for leadership. The stakes for Mr Obama are high indeed. What appears now as a giant step forward for equality and racial harmony in America could all too quickly turn into a giant step back.

Still, the march of progress is unlikely to be reversed completely. A little more than 10 years ago, there was a minor furore when American scientists established that Thomas Jefferson, third US President and author of the Declaration of Independence, probably fathered children by a slave, Sally Hemings. In a well-intentioned, but foolhardy move – fired perhaps by the social optimism that followed Bill Clinton's survival of impeachment – scions of the Jefferson family invited descendants of Ms Hemings to their annual gathering at the Virginia estate, Monticello.

It was a balmy sunlit evening in mid-May. But the atmosphere was glacial. Any mixing of the families was halting and forced. No amount of cocktails could disguise the reality that this was Meet the Family at its most gratingly awkward. The then chairman of the Monticello Association, which then comprised only white descendants, though, was categorical. "The door being opened now is not going to close... What we've got is not a real problem, but real cousins, and we've got an opportunity here." Mr Obama's inauguration is the clearest expression of that opportunity extended to America at large.

Where Mr Obama cites unity and freedom as his presidential mission, George Bush's ambition, before 9/11 cast its malign shadow, was to restore honour and dignity to the White House. In the narrow sense that the White House remained free of personal scandal through his tenure, he succeeded – though there were, of course, other, monumental failures. Those same failures, though, facilitated the election of America's first black President, who comes to office with an 80 per cent approval rating at home and almost universal goodwill abroad. Thus may George Bush indirectly have restored honour and dignity to the United States – in the eyes of its own countrymen and the world.

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