The election of Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan goatherd, as the 44th President of the United States of America is a moment to savour, proof that the promise of a better day, expressed in prose that rises like poetry, can still carry an electorate. The margin of victory was emphatic and, whatever else follows, today the world changed. The cheers of the exultant crowd in Grant Park, Chicago will find their echo across the free world.

This is not to belittle the Republican candidate John McCain. We knew from his life that he is a brave man. We know from his campaign that he is a good man. But, from today, a black child born in America will look on his nation with greater pride because he will feel that the highest office in the land is open to him. The American nation will replenish the confidence that it has lately lost. In the eyes of the world, the slate will be clean and the pretext, always spurious, for anti-Americanism has been removed. On his very first day, and without doing a thing, Barack Obama has brought America together and brought America closer to the world.

The Presidential campaign of 2008 has been an affront to the orthodox view that politics is a cynical enterprise. This is not to be naïve about the virtues of the candidates. It is to say that the process of liberal democracies — argument, debate, the silent and voluntary transfer of power conducted by peaceful people casting a vote in record numbers — is something to behold and something to cherish. There is no political system more hospitable to individual liberty; no political procedure more noble. The people of America have decided their country needs to change. Their voice is clear and resonant and the story it tells is moving and uplifting.

The short history of the United States of America contains many fine passages but one terrible blemish. The Obama campaign ended with a rally in Manassas, Virginia, close to the site of the first major battle of the civil war that split America in two on the issue that is still its greatest scar: slavery. Entire American lives passed in servitude and no single moment can truly expiate the shame. But it would be a hard heart that said no progress has been made today. It would be a hard-bitten cynic that did not allow that, forty years after separation by skin colour was still a shameful fact of life, America today closes that chapter. By making such an eloquent claim to the future, Barack Obama has done more than anyone before him to redefine the past.

Times Archive, 1963: Let freedom ring

'All this will end one day. We will hew hope out of the mountain of despair'

• Topic: The assassination of Martin Luther King

There will come a time, soon, when difficult questions will be asked of President Obama. Is energy independence feasible? Is health care reform at all likely in the midst of a recession? What can he actually do for the dispossessed? How quickly can the United States military withdraw from Iraq? The economic legacy is dreadful, to state the obvious and say the least. A Presidency won with rhetoric at a high altitude may discover that it has failed to repeal the law of gravity after all.

But not today and, perhaps, not ever. It is true that Obama’s campaign has excited great expectations without ever specifying them. There is always a danger that supporters will later supply their own definition of what the Presidency was supposed to have promised. The line often extends from hope to betrayal without ever passing through reality.

But the achievements, the arguments, the what-ifs, the fear of disappointment: these are not for now. The essential point about President Barack Obama is the privilege of being able to write this sentence. A black man has been elected to the highest office of the most powerful country of the world and, to borrow one of his own phrases, a righteous wind is at his back.