Leading article: Obama: living the dream

By now, nearly one in three of those American voters likely to vote will have done so. Among them, Barack Obama has a substantial double-digit lead. Unless something is very wrong with the US opinion-polling industry, Senator Obama is more certain to be the President-elect on Wednesday morning than any candidate since George Bush's father beat Michael Dukakis in 1988.

For months now, journalists have been ransacking the storeroom of superlatives in an attempt to describe this moment. "President Obama" still sounds shocking as the 44th in a list of not merely European but Anglo-Saxon and Celtic names. In the 1980s it was said, usually in respect of the ambitions of Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, that no one whose name ended in a vowel could become president. Well, several further walls of prejudice are now being breached. Not only that but, as Rupert Cornwell writes today, "no US president in modern times, probably none in the country's entire history, will have come to power so untested".

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Yet the American people seem to be deciding, in dream-like slow motion, that such imagined barriers do not matter. This election is an extraordinary moment of liberation from the assumptions of the past.

John McCain's final-week focus on Senator Obama's "socialist" plans to tax and spend has gained some traction, but not enough to deflect voters from their judgement that the party of the rich is less qualified to manage a recession. Equally, the charge of inexperience has been one of the least wounding, and not only because Senator McCain sawed the branch from under himself by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. The truth is that nothing can prepare a person for the presidency and that, if calmness under pressure, open-minded intelligence and the avoidance of mistakes are what is needed, then Senator Obama's election campaign proves him fit for office.

Above all, the most inspiring quality that Senator Obama brings is that of public intelligence. Unlike President Bush, an intelligent man who pretended to be stupid, he has treated the campaign as a dialogue about serious issues – as has Senator McCain, with slightly less consistency. This week, the next phase begins: the euphoria; so now is the time to guard against disappointment. We in Britain have been there and done that. The hope offered by Tony Blair's landslide 11 years ago was probably not capable of fulfilment because it was interpreted differently by almost everyone who felt it.

So we know that the new president will not be able to change America or the world overnight when he is inaugurated on 20 January. Although The Independent on Sunday led the opposition in this country to the invasion of Iraq, we have never argued that coalition troops should be pulled out immediately. An Obama presidency would, rightly, cut US troop numbers with the co-operation and consent of the Iraqi government.

On the economic front, and even with a Democratic Congress, President Obama will not be able to defy the laws of the dismal science. He may protect middle- and low-income Americans better than the Republicans would do, but he can no more abolish the business cycle than could Gordon Brown.

What he can do, as Geoffrey Lean, our environment editor, reports today, is plan for a Green New Deal. This is a bold way to turn the downturn into an opportunity to recalibrate the economy to take account of climate change. Again, Senator McCain stepped on his own fine environmental record by his choice of running mate.

And yet, there is more to this election than a comparison of policy. By electing Senator Obama, Americans will finally realise the promise of their nation's founding ideal, of equal opportunity, as forged in the Civil War and as restated by Martin Luther King. Senator Obama really has been judged, not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character.

More than that, the election of Senator Obama will help to drain the poisonous swamps of anti-Americanism around the world. More than any of his predecessors, Senator Obama is a citizen of the world. A US poll last week found that even Tony Blair is regarded as "more American" than he. Senator Obama's election will do more to protect Americans (and the rest of us) by tackling the causes of Islamist terrorism than any hard-line national security policies.

It may be argued the transformative power of Senator Obama's election would be more symbolic than real. That is unnecessarily cynical, but even if true, these are terribly important symbols. To borrow a phrase from his campaign, this is symbolic change we can believe in.