In his ode to America, America Is Not the World, British pop singer Morrissey forlornly sung that the U.S. is indeed the land of the free, yet it never has had a president who is female, black or gay. The upcoming presidential election, however, will likely address that lack.

Even if Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, loses to John McCain in the November election --and the smart money is against that happening -- what has transpired this primary election season has shown how much America has changed.

The primary season has also showed us that this land of opportunity never stops to inspire us.

Never in its history has America been this close to electing its first African-American president and first female vice president -- assuming that Hillary Clinton stops her foot-dragging and jump onto Obama's bandwagon.

Even for world-weary pundits and skeptics, the sight of an African American standing at a podium delivering a speech about healing the planet, stopping the war and restoring America's good image -- and this in his capacity as the presumptive nominee of a major political party -- is enough to give them one of those hair-raising moments of history.

The American people themselves are aware that history is in the making. Talk-radio shows were flooded with emotional calls from listeners soon after the polls closed in Montana and South Dakota, the last two states holding Democratic Party presidential primaries.

An anchor of cable news station CNN showed stacks of email printouts from viewers cheering Obama's win.

Soon after Obama was declared the winner of the primary in Montana, CNN's website was flooded with comments from jubilant viewers. One of them wrote, I believe with tears in his eyes, that he never thought he would live to see America exemplify the true meaning of the famous words in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Another wrote that Obama's nomination was more than historic, it was a paradigm changing.

"You have to know people who were born in the segregated South to really understand this. People who could not try on shoes in shoe stores so they had to trace their shoes on cardboard so they wouldn't defile the shoes," the writer said.

Yes, Obama's victory in the Democratic Presidential primary transpired less than 50 years after Rosa Parks was told to move out of her seat and to the colored section in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Only two years ago, no one would have thought that a skinny first-term African-American senator from Illinois with a funny-sounding name would gain much support in the Democratic Party primary, especially because of his idealistic platform on bringing about change in America, and from the fact that he would be running against one of the most powerful political families in America, the Clintons.

And strangely enough, it is also this African-American candidate, who has been dismissed as a latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Ivy League elitist who had to pretend that he could bowl and drink beer just to win votes from white, working-class voters in Middle America.

It was Iowa that showed the world about how much America has changed and how much it wanted change. Primary wins for Obama were predictable in places like Louisiana, with a sizable African-American community and which recently elected the first governor of Indian descent, Bobby Jindall. But in Iowa, the whitest of white states, victory for Obama was far-fetched.

But it is as if voters in Iowa wanted to send a message to the world that America is ready to elect an African-American president.

More than anything this else, Obama's nomination is a representation of the American people's desire to repudiate eight years of the George W. Bush administration, which has left the good image of America in tatters. Never in American history has the image of the country been this bad. As for President Bush, he recently polled the lowest approval rating in history for a U.S. president.

It has been common for great powers like America, a country endowed with abundant resources, to translate them into expansionist drives, and America has done this several times in the past. But if in the past American troops were greeted as liberators and bringers of democracy and freedom, today American soldiers are seen as occupiers in foreign lands.

The Bush administration's expansionist drive has been carried out recklessly and with minimal concern for the international community. Every top official who has parted ways with the White House seems to have felt obliged to write a book about how deceptive and misguided the Bush administration was and is.

It would be too much to ask that Obama, if he elected president, quickly end the war in Iraq given the geopolitical implications, but the prospect of seeing an African America in the White House is more than enough to assure the world that America is ready to lead the world in a different way.

In the words of Robin Nibblet, director of London think tank Chatham House, Obama is the exciting image of what European hoped America was.

Multilateralist Europe has every interest to see an American president becoming a conscientious partner in shaping the world order, and Obama will likely fit the bill with his intention to hold dialogues even with America's enemies.

It seems that Obama now has the cosmological burden to restore the imbalance that was created by the Bush administration. After one leader failed so badly, Americans will have the chance to vote for a totally different type of leader as a fitting replacement to undo all the damage.

As for us in Southeast Asia, it will also be too much to expect that a President Obama would reverse America's "benign neglect" policy in the region, but seeing someone with a semblance of Indonesian roots in the White House is more than enough, just like people in Obama's father homeland of Kenya are proud to have their "cousin" being nominated for the White House.

Our hope is that Americans will never cease to inspire us the way they are doing now.

The writer, a journalist at The Jakarta Post, is a graduate student at the Political Science Department of Northern Illinois University (NIU) in DeKalb, Illinois.

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