Finally, the Democratic party nominated Barack Obama for president of the United States, the first African-American to lead a major party ticket - a truly historic moment if there ever was one.
And, yes, true, there was that undercurrent of anxiety among Democrats as their national convention opened on Monday: Obama looks vulnerable. Their party's nominee for president is not that far ahead, if it all, in the polls against the Republican contender. The race is tight. The watchword from the swing states is, well, let's wait and see. Most former supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton reportedly will back Obama, but 27 per cent of them said they would shift their votes in November to his rival John McCain. As the convention opened in Denver's raucous Pepsi Centre on Monday, they fretted, they worried. The general election, as they now see it, has become more fiercely competitive. Is it possible, they asked, not so much verbalising the question as suggesting it with a pained look, that Barack Obama, Mr Cool, who beat the formidable Clinton machine, may lose the national election?
The Democrats went to Denver to make history, but turned instead into worrywarts.
"If they want to win in November, Democrats have one task to accomplish this week: Snap out of it", wrote Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. "Somehow tentativeness and insecurity have infected a party that ought to be full of confident swagger. It's not that Democrats don't like their odds of winning the presidency and boosting their majorities in both houses in Congress. It's that they are even bothering to calculate and recalculate those odds."
Not sizzling
He is right. Democrats have nothing to fear but fear itself. The Republicans over the last eight years have left a woeful record for voters to contemplate. The economy is not exactly sizzling, oil prices have shot up to the ceiling, the war in Iraq is in its sixth year, and Americans are confused about their place in the world. Add to that the fact that the Republican candidate for president is not only so wooden you could make a coffee table out of him, but he has supported George W. Bush - undeniably the most unpopular president in modern history - every step of the way.
Moreover, a political leader such as John McCain, who talks about "Al Qaida recruits being trained in Iran" and about the "porous border between Iraq and Pakistan" is clearly not someone who has grown with his job.
America, I say, is ready for Obama, a man who by sheer dint of rhetorical extravagance, charisma and intelligence was able to wrest his party's nomination from the most powerful machine in Democratic politics. Obama's exotic background - that melange of Muslim African, Kansas Wasp, Indonesian childhood and Harvard education - is uniquely responsive to the multicultural sensibility that America has, willy-nilly, acquired over the last half century.
While writing this column on deadline, Thursday morning, I was looking forward to watching Obama at the Democratic convention later that night as he accepts his party's nomination for president - fittingly, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech about his dream for America as a land "where you are judged not by the colour of your skin but by the content of your character".
Millions of others will be watching, in the US and elsewhere, knowing that soon the failed Bush years will be over, and the bitter relationship that the Republican president had developed with most countries around the world will be mended.
If you're a one issue voter, say as an Arab American, no doubt you were disturbed by his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference where he spoke of "Israel's security as sacrosanct" and his disturbing reference to a "united Jerusalem", and by his seeming lack of compassion for Palestinian suffering during his visit to the Holy Land recently. Well, other Americans have their doubts too, including large numbers of Democrats.
As the Economist opined recently: "Some see him as too young and inexperienced for a dangerous world; others find him unattractively self-regarding and aloof; still others question his patriotism."
Balancing act
But running for office as the next commander in chief is a balancing act, where the candidate plays on a verbal instrument of uncanny virtuosity in order to respond to the diversity of ideological currents and political sensibilities with which society at large is imbued. What is significant is that Obama the candidate is telling us that America has changed, it has shut the door forever on the riot and humiliation it had visited on people of colour all those years.
If Obama wins the presidency, then that will make an eloquent statement about the United States. It will mean that a descendant of African Muslims has brought America to a turning point, and that Americans have opted to turn with it. We will then see in the sum of Barack Obama's labours a power, a cogency that looms large over America's projected self-definitions as a big power with a more benign, less pugnacious polity.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
