Here comes the sun

Morning in America?

STICK a fork in John McCain. He's done. He has been out-campaigned, out-thought, and out-classed by a better candidate. This has always been Barack Obama's best weapon -- not his soaring oratory or his ability to tap into the mood of the electorate or his unerring knack for being in the right place at the right time, on the right side of history.
Obama's most singular asset has always been that he is a cool, tough customer who knows how to run a cool, tough race. He is not just a preternaturally gifted politician with acute intelligence and palpable integrity, but he is also disciplined, on-message, determined, and steady as a rock.
He knows how to carefully plot out a campaign, first for the Democratic primary nomination against prohibitive odds, and then for the general election, and see it through to the end, staying calm and focused even as the world, and his opponents, implode around him. That is why he will be the next president of the United States.
Don't get me wrong. McCain can still win. Anything can happen. But if McCain does manage, improbably, to pull it out of the fire, if there is an early November surprise, for one reason or another, he will still never be anything more than an accidental president.
This US presidential election is like the one of 1932 and the one of 1980 -- an election that will fundamentally alter the course of the US and thus the world for the next several decades.
Obama has the potential to be for liberal Americans what Ronald Reagan was for conservatives, and he has the potential to do for liberalism what Reagan did for conservatism.
In 1980, the Democrats were out of ideas, hopeless, lost, confused, divided. It was only in the last few weeks that Reagan pulled ahead, and Carter might easily have won. But what would he have done with his victory? He had no vision to take the country forward.
Reagan had a vision, one that tapped powerfully into the prevailing public mood, and it was one he was able to sell to the American people. He moved the country dramatically rightwards.
In the late 1970s and 1980s almost all of the interesting intellectual ideas in America, both on domestic policy and foreign policy, was coming from the right-hand side of the political aisle.
I can't say that I much care for them, but the simple truth was that the Democrats didn't have anything to put up in response -- only old, stale, discredited ideas from the 1960s and early 1970s that were already past their sell-by date.
For the past three decades, Americans, and the rest of us, have been living in a world dominated by conservative ideas. Communism is as good as dead, and socialism and liberalism have long been in decline as ideologies.
But now, the times are changing. The pendulum is swinging back the other way. It is the free market idealogues and the dogmatic deregulators whose ideas are now looking worn-out and discredited, and the best, most thoughtful, most intellectually interesting work is now coming from those on the left-hand side of the political aisle.
The coup de grace was applied to the period of conservative ascendancy by the Iraq war and the global financial crisis. Both laid bare the bankruptcy, if you will pardon the expression, of the right wing's vision for the world.
We have learned that the neo-conservative foreign policy pursued by the Bush administration simply doesn't work, either for America or for the rest of us. The Bush Doctrine, the unilateralism, the my-way-or-the highway approach to dealing with the rest of the world has been a failure, and, as a result, we are, all of us, living in a less safe world.
Secondly, we have seen the failure of unfettered free markets and unthinking deregulation, the notion that less government is always better, and that the solution to every economic problem is lower taxes and less regulation.
McCain, for all his protestations to the contrary, offers no sign that he has learned anything from the grim lessons of the past eight years, much less anything new. In this, he is not alone. His entire party is out of ideas.
Obama is the one who offers a bold and promising vision of the future, a vision that puts America in partnership with the rest of the world, a vision that believes that free markets work best when there is strict regulation and oversight, which believes that there is an important role for government to play.
The prevailing ideology in the Republican Party on so many issues, from global warming to energy security to financial markets, truly represents the point of view of only a few discredited, fringe thinkers. Almost all the experts, the authorities, those who have studied these matters, are on the side of the Democrats.
More importantly, after eight long years of George Bush, so are the American people. In terms of the policies they support, they overwhelmingly have had enough of the Bush policies. They want something new.
Barack Obama has the capacity to be a historic president. Not because of his race, though certainly that is a factor whose significance should not be under-estimated, and the fact that the US might elect as president a man with an African father is indeed something to marvel at that speaks gloriously of the country and how far it has come.
No, the more significant factor is his capacity, as both someone who can channel the mood of the people, as well as someone who can lead the way, to help forge a new world.
To alter, fundamentally, America's relation to the rest of the world would be a worthy achievement. To preside over a period of responsible, people-centred growth and development would be equally commendable. To help usher in a time where the world is dedicated again to justice and equality would be truly historic.
As Bangladeshis, we often wonder what difference US elections make to us. But, of course, they make a huge difference. From the role of Nixon in 1971, to US hostility to Bangladesh's first government, to the US government's current misguided outreach to those it mistakenly thinks of as "moderate Muslims," we can see that it can make a lot of difference to Bangladeshis who the occupant of the White House is.
Of course, the US doesn't have a Bangladesh policy, per se. It has a majority Muslim nation policy, into which we are shoe-horned. But if the new president decided to move beyond America's ill-advised policy of accommodation with political opportunists pretending to speak in the name of Islam, and tries instead to reach out to liberals, progressives, and secular voices in majority Muslim countries, then the outlook for Bangladesh brightens considerably.
Barack Obama may be that president. If he wins on Tuesday, the changes, one hopes for the better, will be felt in some way, small or big, in every corner of the Earth, including Bangladesh.
Here's hoping for a Barack Obama victory on Tuesday. These last eight years have been a long, cold, lonely winter.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.