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COMMENTARY: Prejudice crushed by the march of history
By Niall Ferguson Last updated at 1:41 AM on 06th November 2008
There are moments - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela - when history leaps and the heart leaps with it.
Just a few days before Barack Obama's epoch-making election victory on Tuesday, a friend in New York e-mailed me A Change Is Gonna Come, a wonderfully apposite track by the Sixties soul singer, Sam Cooke:
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since.
It's been a long, a long time comin'
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.
As I listened to those words, sung by Cooke with heart-rending pathos, I suddenly realised that there were tears pouring down my face.
After the centuries of discrimination and prejudice that African-Americans have endured, the prospect of a brown-skinned man becoming the 44th President of the United States suddenly seemed little short of miraculous.
When I came to the U.S. in 1981, racial bigotry was endemic. On the mean streets of New York, harassment of black youths by Irish-American cops was almost routine.
The word 'nigger' was still freely used by many Southern whites. On network TV, black actors were given the roles of clowns or crooks (think of the embarrassing Huggy Bear in Starsky & Hutch).
If you had told me back then that in 2008 a black man would be elected president, I would have assumed you'd just scored some crack cocaine from Huggy.
Yes, it's been a long time comin', but it has come.
Finally, in the wake of Obama's intensely moving acceptance in Chicago on Tuesday night, the words in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence ring wholly true: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that immortal sentence, he was a slave owner; in all, he owned around 200 slaves, of whom he freed only seven. In a quotation from his autobiography, which you can see inside his pristine marble memorial on the Mall in Washington DC, Jefferson appeared to disavow the South's 'peculiar institution'.
He wrote: 'Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [meaning the slaves] are to be free.'
But he went on to add - and the sculptors of the memorial preferred to leave this out - that 'the two races' were divided by 'indelible lines of distinction between them'.
I was forcefully reminded what those 'indelible lines' meant in practice just a few weeks ago when I visited the birthplace at Stratford in Virginia of General Robert E. Lee - the Confederacy's greatest general during the Civil War.
Today, the Lee plantation is a movingly unvarnished monument to the realities of Southern discomfort: on one side, the manor house inhabited by the Lees; on the other, the primitive huts that were the slave quarters.
The North's victory in the Civil War ended slavery in the U.S., but it did not end legal discrimination against African-Americans.
As late as 1945, for example, 30 states had statutes prohibiting interracial marriage.
These restrictions were still on the statute books of 16 states when they were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967.
It's conventional to refer to Barack Obama as black or African-American. But that is to miss his real historical significance. He is the product of a mixed marriage between a white American woman and a Kenyan.
It's astonishing to reflect that, at the time of their union in 1961, such marriages were still unconstitutional in a third of American states - including some that gave Obama his sweeping election victory this week.
In the grand scheme of history, four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to the apotheosis of Barack Obama.
You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.
Yet it was not just for these historical reasons that I switched my allegiance to Barack Obama in the course of the past six months.
Not long after this marathon campaign got under way nearly two years ago, I became one of John McCain's foreign policy advisers. At that time, he struck me as ideally suited to the job of president.
With America preoccupied by terrorist threats and foreign wars, he combined first-hand military experience and gritty personal integrity.
If national security had remained the dominant issue in this election year, I might have stayed on board.
But when the facts change, you have to be ready to change your mind; and the facts changed dramatically when the financial crisis that originated last year in the sub-prime mortgage market blew up into a full-scale panic this September and October.
Economics, John McCain was frank enough to admit in an unguarded moment, is not his strong suit. It turned out not to be his party's strong suit either.
Not since the early Seventies - perhaps not since the early Thirties - has the U.S. experienced a financial crisis of this magnitude. It is a crisis that calls for an entirely different set of skills from those John McCain evinced in this campaign.
While McCain was impulsive, his opponent was cool. While McCain was irascible, his opponent was calm.
And while McCain made the single worst decision of his political career - choosing the lightweight Sarah Palin as his running mate - his opponent was collected.
In all three presidential debates, as the public mood shifted from economic anxiety to outright panic, the two candidates diverged. The more edgy McCain became, the more centred Obama became.
In a crisis like this, we need three things from a new president. We need an inaugural address as inspiring as Franklin Roosevelt's in 1933. We need a temperament that doesn't overheat under pressure.
And we need disciplined, focused organisation, to ensure that the new administration does not bungle its first 100 days the way Bill Clinton bungled his in 1993.
In this campaign, which has combined soaring oratory with superhuman sang-froid and faultless management, Obama has shown he has all three qualities. McCain's went missing in action.
The tragedy - the word is not too strong - is, of course, that the first black president is inheriting such a huge financial mess.
Obama's campaign promises of tax cuts and spending hikes were, in fact, more modest than McCain's (another point in Barack's favour), but the reality is that he no longer has $1trillion dollars to play with over the next four years.
The money has already been spent by Treasury Secretary Paulson on the mother of all bail-outs for the tottering banking system.
Add together all the measures taken in the past 14 months by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and you find the liabilities of the government have leapt upwards from $7.5 trillion to nearly $12trillion.
We are already hearing calls from jubilant Democrats in Congress for even more spending - which means even more borrowing.
The new President's first big challenge is to find a Treasury Secretary tough enough to resist this pressure.
For if Obama gives in, the international bond market may start wondering if U.S. Treasury bonds really are the safest investment in the world. Doubts could prove lethal.
Some of the great ghosts of America past hovered over Chicago on Tuesday night.
Not only Jefferson and Martin Luther King, but also Lincoln and the Kennedy brothers looked down in wonder.
But Franklin Roosevelt was watching, too. And wondering what cruel fate decided to match the first black president with what could yet prove to be the second Great Depression.
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