Comment Central: what are your hopes for Obama? | The Child returned - and final battle was joined

As the first African-American children to take up residence in the White House, Malia and Sasha Obama can look forward to a gilded life of elite schools, the finest healthcare, unbounded career opportunities and – for now at least – perhaps the most exciting prospect of all: the new puppy their father has promised.

When Barack Obama’s captivating children skipped into the limelight alongside him as history was made in Chicago last Tuesday night, Sasha, 7, waved happily at the ecstatic crowd as Malia, 10, strode serenely alongside their mother Michelle.

For a few moments, as this strikingly attractive family group basked together in the roar of election victory, the magnitude of Obama’s achievement was written on the faces of his wife and children: a black family en route to Washington, to the finest address in the land.

“Each of us will always remember this moment,” exulted Henry Louis Gates Jr, one of America’s foremost African-American historians. “My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried.”

Yet as the euphoria inevitably gives way to the harsh realities of recession and war, Obama’s young daughters may come to symbolise more than a great moment of racial progress. Their privileged lives will serve as a constant reminder of the lingering inequalities of American life, and the scale of the challenge that Obama now faces as he attempts to turn election promise into lasting social change.

“In this country – of all countries – no child’s destiny should be determined before he takes his first step,” Obama declared during the campaign.

“No little girl’s future should be confined to the neighbourhood she was born into.”

For the vast majority of African-American schoolgirls, having a father to care for them at all is a rare gift. More than 70% of black babies born in America last year were born to single mothers. A young black woman growing up in America faces a list of disadvantages so daunting that even Obama, in a speech on urban America in Washington last July, asked with a note of disbelief in his voice: “How can a country like this allow it?” A black baby girl is more than twice as likely to die in infancy as a white child. She is more likely to contract childhood diseases such as asthma and diabetes. She will be more prone to obesity and will most probably end up in an underfunded and understaffed state school, where her grades will be significantly lower than for white students.

A black woman faces a life expectancy that is five years shorter than for white women. Throughout her life she will be paid on average less than two-thirds of a white man’s wage for her job; she may have trouble finding a husband who has not been to jail, and more problems finding a house in a neighbourhood free of drug-dealers. She is more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer and will not live as long after diagnosis as white women in a similar condition.

These are some of the many inequalities that Obama has pledged to address through his sweeping proposals for universal healthcare, education reform and redistribution of wealth. Yet it was clear last week, as black communities across the country rejoiced at his election, that many African-Americans have hopelessly unrealistic expectations of what their new president might achieve at a time of severe economic retrenchment.

Even before the votes were counted, Peggy Joseph was in little doubt about what an Obama presidency would mean. Gushing with enthusiasm at an Obama rally, she told one television interviewer: “I won’t have to pay for my [petrol] any more. I won’t have to work to pay my mortgage. He’s going to help me.”

In Washington on election night, Isaac Johnson was wandering around the Eastern market in a daze, tears running down his cheeks. “It’s all changed, man,” he kept saying. “We’ll get respect now, we’ll get our dream.”

Spike Lee, the African-American film director, declared the election a “seismic shift”. Oprah Winfrey, the television chat show queen, opened her postelection show on Wednesday by screaming “Whoooooo!” over and over again.

Gates, the historian, put it in a historical context: blacks had celebrated, he said, when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863. They had celebrated again when Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, knocked out Max Schmeling in 1938 to become world heavyweight boxing champion. And, of course, they had been transfixed in August 1963 when Martin Luther King proclaimed that he had a dream. “But we have never seen anything like this,” Gates added.

So can Obama really make a difference to the broken lives of so many of his fellow African-Americans? Will the enthusiasm and excitement he has generated save him from accusations of betrayal, should change come more slowly than his supporters expect? Or will Malia and Sasha Obama remain rare and lucky exceptions to the numbingly bleak experience of their peers? OBAMA aides moved quickly last week to dampen expectations. “It’s important that everyone understands that this is not going to happen overnight,” said Robert Gibbs, who is expected to become Obama’s White House press spokesman. “There has to be a realistic expectation of what can happen and how quickly.”

The Obama camp has long been careful to avoid identifying Obama too closely with African-American problems – as opposed to generic health, education and other problems that affect Americans of all races.

“President-elect Obama did not put himself forward as an African-American president,” noted Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state. “He put himself as an American who happened to be black.” The list of election issues on Obama’s campaign website included women, seniors, veterans and poverty but made no specific mention of African-Americans. His aides have also made clear that he cannot afford to be seen to be favouring blacks if he wants to preserve the broad-based multiracial coalition that has swept him into office. Obama has largely kept his distance from veteran civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who remain polarising figures to much of the white community.

While Washington is preparing for a new black elite to accompany Obama into office – some blacks are already reporting that they are getting better tables at restaurants because maîtres d’ think they may know the new president – there are few doubts about his immediate priorities.

“Preventing the biggest financial crisis in possibly the past century from turning into the next Great Depression,” said Austan Goolsbee, an Obama adviser. “That has to be priority No 1.”

With terrorism-related issues such as the war in Iraq, the future of Guantanamo Bay and relations with Iran also likely to present early headaches, it would be understandable if the grim standards of African-American schools were put on a distant back-burner. Yet Gibbs insisted last week that just because the new president had a lot on his plate did not mean that campaign promises would be broken.

“We believe it is paramount to begin doing everything we said we would do in the campaign,” Gibbs said. “We know expectations are high but disappointment if we didn’t try . . . would be far, far greater than anything else.” ON the corner of 125th Street and Madison Avenue at the heart of Harlem in New York stands an unusual building. It is the bright, modern, six-storey headquarters of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a unique community-building project that has transformed the lives of thousands of youngsters from one of America’s most historic – and most downtrodden – black neighbourhoods.

A few blocks away from Harlem landmarks such as the Apollo theatre and Sylvia’s soul food restaurant, the HCZ offers a compelling opportunity to examine one of Obama’s core election pledges.

In a campaign largely filled with blithe generalities, he made a promise that could scarcely have been more specific: “When I’m president, the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country,” he said on several occasions. “We will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”

In the brightly coloured halls of the two schools that operate on HCZ premises, staff and administrators were thrilled last week that their work had been recognised, but slightly alarmed by the scale of the task that might lie ahead.

“This idea really came out of left field,” said Marty Lipp, the zone’s director of communications. “People see our success and perhaps they think it’s easy. Well, no.”

Launched in 1970 as a modest antitruancy project, HCZ became the brainchild of an innovative black educator named Geoffrey Canada, who realised that Harlem’s schools could never hope to succeed as long as the shattering problems of drug addiction, unemployment and poverty at home went unaddressed.

Canada started with one square city block of houses, patiently knitting together a wide range of welfare, health and education programmes to transform the environment – and prospects – for children living in the target area.

Over the years the project was able to expand until it was providing or coordinating schooling, social services and adult education facilities to residents of a six-block area, then 24 blocks, then 60 and now 97.

As the programme grew it attracted corporate sponsorships and international attention as a shining example of how inner-city blight might be reversed.

A parade of distinguished visitors acclaimed the project, from the former President Bill Clinton – who has an office just down the street – to the Prince of Wales, who was invited to join an HCZ basketball game and made headlines by draining a long shot.

When I visited the project last week, it was not hard to see why it had so impressed Obama. Lines of children in neat red and white school uniforms waited quietly for lunch at the school cafeteria, which served only fresh meals with “low salt, low fat, low sugar”, said Lipp.

There are extensive after-school facilities for children with working parents and health programmes for pensioners and new mothers.

The project has contributed to the much-discussed revitalisation of Harlem, where soaring property prices reflected – at least until recently – the district’s rapid transformation from drug-addled crime scene to the latest in Manhattan real estate chic.

Yet roughly two-thirds of HCZ’s income comes from private corporations and charities that are now under intense pressure as a result of the economic crisis.

One of the project’s health centres was sponsored by Lehman Brothers, now bankrupt and not sponsoring anything. “We’re obviously concerned [about the economic outlook] and may hold growth this year as a precaution,” Lipp said.

He was also keen to emphasise that the HCZ had made no plans of its own to franchise itself to other neighbourhoods or cities. “It’s hard enough at the best of times in a middle-class family to get a kid on the right track to succeed,” he said.

“When you factor in street culture, the break-up of the social fabric in a neighbourhood, the lack of role models, the challenge of fundraising – well, it’s never easy. And it’s even more difficult when you don’t have the resources.”

Obama put it another way during the campaign. “The Harlem Children’s Zone is saving a generation of children for [$60m] a year,” he said. “That’s about what the war in Iraq costs American taxpayers every four hours.”

It would clearly be lovely to think that as Obama winds down the Pentagon’s operation in Iraq, the savings will go to inner-city projects in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and other blighted neighbourhoods. He likes to cite Martin Luther King, who once remarked that “if we can find the money to put a man on the moon, then we can find the money to put a man on his own two feet”.

Yet there are other potentially expensive promises that Obama has made as he takes on the most ambitious programme of Democratic-led social reforms since President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” health and education initiatives of the 1960s.

The long-cherished Democratic dream of a national health service will be paid for by taxing the rich, pledged Obama, who was dubbed “the redistributor-in-chief” by his Republican opponent, John McCain.

He has also promised to raise the minimum wage for workers, cut taxes for the low-paid and provide incentives to businesses relocating to inner cities.

Yet Obama’s hopes for all these projects – for the “yes we can” mantra that ignited his delirious supporters – are plainly overshadowed by the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been earmarked to bail out America’s crippled banking and housing industries.

The US economy lost 240,000 more jobs last month as the unemployment rate climbed to a 14-year high of 6.5%. More than 1.2m jobs have been lost so far this year, and some economists predict that the down-turn will last for most of next year, with the unemployment rate eventually exceeding 8%.

Appearing at a Chicago hotel on Friday for his first press conference as president-elect, Obama acknowledged that he would face some difficult choices. “I do not underestimate the task that lies ahead,” he said. “It is not going to be quick and it is not going to be easy for us to dig ourselves out of the hole we are in.”

In his 20-minute appearance he appeared brisk and confident, managed a joke about choosing his family’s new dog and committed his first postelection gaffe with an offhand reference to Nancy Reagan holding “séances”. He quickly telephoned the 87-year-old former first lady to apologise.

Obama urged Congress to act swiftly on a stalled economic stimulus package and also made clear that the floundering US car industry is likely to be added to the government’s bailout list.

Both Ford and General Motors reported huge third quarter losses last week, and GM warned that it might run out of operating cash before the end of the year.

The president-elect insisted that “the plan that we’ve put forward is the right one”, and Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago congressman who will become his White House chief of staff, told The Wall Street Journal that Obama had been given “clear directions by the country to change policies in Washington”.

Yet Obama aides have shied from giving precise details about policy measures, and it is not clear when and how the Obama administration will proceed with proposals to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year, or to cut taxes for the less well-off. Emanuel noted that the American people were “unbelievably pragmatic”.

The president-elect will visit the White House for talks with President George W Bush tomorrow, and he is expected to name key members of his economic team this week in an effort to calm nervous markets. The key post of treasury secretary is likely to go to either Larry Summers, who served in the same post under Bill Clinton, or Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve bank. Only Summers was present at Friday’s news conference. THE formidable economic burdens were not of Obama’s making, yet their load may quickly subdue the “Obamacan” euphoria in America’s poorest communities. While American voters learnt long ago not to take presidential promises too seriously, Obama built his campaign on a latent groundswell of hope for change.

If circumstances prevent him from delivering, will it be enough that America’s new president is an attractive and sympathetic character? Or will African-Americans in particular expect more than glamour and symbolism?

As the first and only black man to serve on the white-dominated local council of his Pennsylvania hometown of Johnstown, Benny Britt knows more than a little about the pressures of racial division. Britt, 50, is the son of a steelworker who died from respiratory ailments soon after he retired from his job at a coking plant. “Turns out there were programmes for widows of white folk, but nobody told my mother,” he said.

Britt believes that Obama has already succeeded at what may prove his most lasting contribution to African-American life. “He will inspire blacks to stay clean,” Britt said. “His story helps all of us to argue to our kids that there’s a better way. Our kids don’t have to hang around with drugs and murder and mayhem. He made it, a black man is president, and nobody can tell you it can’t be done now.”

Gates, the historian, argued last week that while Obama’s victory hadn’t exactly wiped clean “that bloody slate . . . of slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations”, it was the “symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle”.

He added: “I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the numbers of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community . . . that what happened this week will suddenly make black children learn to read and write . . . but I doubt that they will.”

Yet 389 years after the first African slaves landed on America’s shores, and 44 years after Johnson’s Civil Rights Act swept away the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation, a black family will be living in the White House.

“All I can say is: Amazing Grace!” said Gates. “How sweet the sound.”

Key advisers: who is tipped to be in Obama’s inner circle?

DAVID AXELROD
The rumpled strategist and myth-maker behind Obama’s rise, is referred to simply as “Ax”. He is to be senior adviser at the White House. Although a Chicago-based outsider to Washington, he knows how to play the system.

ROBERT GIBBS
Will become one of the most public faces of the administration as White House press secretary. Tough, authoritative voice of Obama on the campaign trail. “The guy I want in the foxhole with me during incoming fire,” says Obama.

TOM DASCHLE
Former Senate Democrat leader and expert on health issues. When Daschle lost his own seat in the 2004 elections, he gave Obama his top staff and encouraged him to run for president. Is being talked of as a possible health secretary.

ROBERT GATES
Secretary of state for defence, widely seen to have done a good job. Some suggest Obama could keep him on to provide continuity. But opponents say he is surrounded by neocon advisers and has never called for withdrawal from Iraq.

LARRY SUMMERS
A brilliant economist but occasionally gaffe-prone. He once advised dumping waste in “underpolluted” Africa and another time suggested men had a greater aptitude for science than women. Talked of as a potential treasury secretary, but has detractors.

RAHM EMANUEL
Obama’s chief of staff – the man charged with making his boss’s wishes happen. So tough he is sometimes known as Rahmbo.

The A-Z of the new president

Autograph He owns a pair of boxing gloves signed by Muhammad Ali
Barack His name means “One who is blessed” in Swahili
Casablanca His favourite film
Drugs He has said that using marijuana and cocaine in high school was his greatest moral failure
Español He can speak Spanish
Family He has seven half-brothers and sisters in Kenya from his father’s other marriages and a half-sister from his mother’s second marriage
Grammy He won the award in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams from My Father
Hollywood Stars such as Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry supported his campaign
Ivy League He graduated from Harvard law school
Jay-Z The rapper’s lyrics “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one”, sung at Obama’s Iowa caucus victory party in January, taken by some as a reference to Hillary Clinton
Kogelo His ancestral village in Kenya
Left-handed He is the sixth postwar president to be so
Michelle His first date with his wife-to-be was to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
National holiday Declared in Kenya in his honour
O’Bomber His high school nickname earned for his basketball skills
Preacher He criticised his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for his explosive sermons on race
Quit He is struggling to give up cigarettes after promising Michelle he would do so if he ran for president.
Renegade The codename given to him by his secret service handlers
Shrimp linguini His favourite meal, cooked by his wife
Trousers A smart dresser, he dislikes the youth fashion for sagging trousers that expose the backside
University He studied at Columbia in New York before going to Harvard
Varsity team He played basketball in high school
Wealth In December 2007, Money magazine estimated the Obama family’s net worth at $1.3m
X Malcolm – although the assassinated black leader provided early inspiration, Obama rejected his militancy
YouTube The BarackObama.com channel has more than 1,800 videos
Zzzz Obama gets by on four or five hours’ sleep a night