Just as there are said to be no atheists in foxholes, there aren't too many Obama-sceptics to be found confessing to doubt about the Great Rebirth of American Democracy this week.

It's a well-established phenomenon that opinion polls taken in the wake of an election find many more people claim to have voted for the winner than actually did, so great is the desire to be a member of the victorious team.

As the Times resident Obama-sceptic, I'm especially uncomfortable. Observing the outpouring of euphoria in these pages over the past few days, I have felt at times a little like the evangelical Christian who's been invited by accident to a gay wedding.

Still, in the spirit of the moment, and throwing grumpy caution to the wind, bear with me for a while as I jump right in and kiss the groom.

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BACKGROUND

• Bush - 'We should all be proud of Obama'

• The challenge that greets Obama

• Full video and text: Obama's victory speech

• Voters honour Martin Luther King's dream

Multimedia

• Team Obama - who are they?

• Bonjour 'Barack'

Not that I've revised my pre-electoral judgment that an Obama administration and a solidly Democratic Congress represent the most significant and unwelcome leftward tilt in American politics in at least a generation. The intervention of a mere election has not suddenly made any more palatable a policy platform that includes tax increases in the midst of a recession, tough new rules on companies' freedom to invest in profitable business overseas, the re-empowerment of trade unions, a protectionist trade policy and a foreign policy that promises to place way too much trust in what may be gained through simply being liked by the rest of the world.

On all of this, I'm clinging to the hope that the President Obama who shows up in the White House will be not the Obama of voting record - as solidly to the left as any presidential candidate since George McGovern - but the bipartisan and pragmatic Obama of rhetorical promise from his books and campaign speeches. We shall see.

But after a significant election, it's only right for all who laud the virtues of democracy to find good cause to celebrate the verdict of the people. And there are at least three really good things to be said about the famous Obama victory.

The most obvious is race. It's in danger of becoming a tired cliché even before it has happened, but the significance of an African-American in the White House can never be overstated. Even casual observers of America know the terrible history of the black man in this country and it's no secret how much race still divides the US today. What happened this week will be remembered for ever.

There needs to be some realism about what Mr Obama can achieve on this front, it's true. The sheer joy evident on the black faces that celebrated in the early hours of Wednesday worried me a little. Expectations like that are going to be very hard to meet. The achievements of the Civil Rights era were far greater in legal fact than the mere symbolism of a black president, but they haven't exactly eliminated the race problem.

Still, for now, the fulfilment of an African-American dream - in significant part through the votes of tens of millions of whites and Latinos - is a simply wonderful moment worth savouring, and for the rest of the world, perhaps even worth emulating.

Secondly, let's be frank: democracy worked on Tuesday. We no longer shoot an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the others but it is an essential feature of effective rule by the people that the people should throw out a governing party when it screws up.

Accountability is not only a good thing for the nation. It's a good thing for the party that has done the screwing up. The Republicans have spectacularly lost their way in the past few years. John McCain is a great man who had a better chance than any to lead his party back from the wilderness, but the campaign never really convinced enough people that they should have much more faith in his party than they have in President Bush.

In the very long run I think history may be kinder to Mr Bush than the voters have been, but for now it's hard to argue with the proposition that changing leadership actually seems rather prudent. And if, as many fear, the Democrats turn out to be a disaster, the democratic prerogative would suggest it is at least right that the country should have a different sort of disaster from the past eight years.

Thirdly, there's this slightly nebulous and rather soppy business of hope. As much as I admire Mr McCain, it's clear that if he had won, it would have been largely a triumph of fear. Now, fear is an unfairly maligned emotion. It's not invalid to feel fearful. Sometimes fear is a wholly appropriate reaction to one's surroundings. Science tells us that fear raises the adrenalin, concentrates the mind, rouses the defensive instinct. If you weren't a bit fearful when you were piloting your Spitfire into the enemy's crosshairs in the Battle of Britain, you probably weren't going to survive.

There's much for Americans and the world to fear today. The young man who will soon be the most powerful on the planet has almost no experience of handling a serious crisis. Unscrupulous enemies may seize their moment. The threat of economic calamity presses in on many fronts.

We've heard much about the importance of hope. Hope alone won't get you anywhere. Hope doesn't pay bills or win wars.

But there's something special about an election in the current circumstances. It feels right - and something intrinsically American - that when a moment of crisis coincides with an opportunity to change, it should be hope, not fear, that is the dominant emotion. It has been that way in the past - from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that Barack Obama has yet demonstrated his suitability for that pantheon. But we can say this for him: just as they did in the midst of earlier periods of crisis, he has correctly identified that the genius of America is its capacity to look forward through the fog of uncertainty with real and surprising optimism.

If he can resist the temptations of his party's ideological orthodoxies, and make good on his promise to be a different sort of president, he'll have at least a good chance of giving the American people more than just the hope they feel today.

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