<i>Obama set for a date with destiny</i>
After a gruelling, hard-fought rollercoaster 21 months, Barack Obama stands on the brink of realizing his improbable quest and making history by becoming the first black US president.
On February 10, 2007, the little unknown Illinois senator stood on the steps of the state's capitol building on a freezing winter's day and urged thousands of supporters to join him in his audacious tilt at the White House.
"If you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching before us ... if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our slumber, and slough off our fear ... then I'm ready to take up the cause," Obama said.
Now with the polls predicting he will win the presidency and roundly defeat Republican rival John McCain on Tuesday, Obama seems set for a date with destiny.
Four short years ago, when George W Bush and John Kerry were battling for the keys to the White House, Obama was just a little known Chicago politician who gave a dazzling speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.
But he has ignited a new fervour and excitement in a country frustrated by the same old faces on the political scene, panicked by an economic crisis which has dragged down the world's top economy and sickened by the Iraq war.
In defying the odds, the 47-year-old African-American senator has reshaped conventional wisdom on how to pay for a successful White House bid by harnessing the Internet as a powerful fund-raising tool.
In September, Obama's campaign smashed its already staggering record with a mammoth haul of more than 150 million dollars in one month as they barrelled towards the November 4 vote.
Aides said Obama now has more than 3.1 million donors. The result has allowed the young senator to take on the weight of the well-established, wealthy Republican machine, as well as see off his Democratic primary rival former first lady Hillary Clinton.
For the first time in decades, true Republican red states such as Virginia and North Carolina are now being touted as battlegrounds, which could turn to Democratic blue.
Obama has been openly compared to another young senator John F Kennedy, who in the early 1960s re-energized his nation. And in the rollercoaster primary race, Obama was symbolically passed the dynasty's political mantle by liberal lion Senator Edward Kennedy.
In his meteoric rise, Obama appears to be realising long-held dreams that the United States may be slowly turning a page on centuries of bitter racial divisions.
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