The world "allowed" the US to become the dominant power by letting Americans believe their country is "exceptional". Only if that belief is beaten out of them will the world be safe from the US, he said.

Four years ago, I'd have wanted to drive down there with my Louisville Slugger to express my appreciation to someone who travels so far to rally opponents of his native country. But, as has become impossible to deny, the failures of Bush and the Republican Congress are so overwhelming that none but the most deluded partisan could fail to see that the critics have a point.

Voters may return Democratic majorities to the House and Senate next week for the first time since 1992, probably accelerating a US withdrawal from Iraq and signalling a major shift in policies foreign and domestic. With a deep breath, let me say this is no bad thing.

The US market of ideas has been distorted since 9/11. A Democratic Congress will help bring supply and demand back into balance.

Markets work.

Watch Tennessee on election night. Retiring Republican Bill Frist leaves an open seat. The Democratic challenger is Harold Ford, who is black. He would be the first African-American elected from a southern state with a significant number of white votes. Even a close loss will encourage another black senator, Barack Obama, with still higher ambitions.

Obama's father is from Kenya, his mother from Kansas. Born in Hawaii in 1961, raised for several years in Indonesia; Columbia University, years spent working with Chicago's poor; Harvard Law School . . . where he became the first black editor of the Law Review; civil rights lawyer, Illinois State Senate, elected to the US Senate in 2004.

His 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address was far superior in content and delivery to any oration in US politics that year or since. It instantly convinced many that Obama has the stuff to one day be president. It called Americans to common cause, to heal their wounds, to honestly acknowledge and address the nation's problems. It fused a belief in justice for the poor with a belief that the rich are not evil. It evoked the rhythms and references of black preachers.

It was a voice absent from politics since the late 1960s . . .

an absence which left US politics impoverished.

Other than Republican John McCain, Obama is the only person in US politics who generates authentic excitement . . .

and talk of a presidential run, maybe in a few years. Obama is just 45. He should wait his turn, went the thinking. But, last weekend, he made it clear that he might not be content to wait.

The prospect of a 2008 Obama run is making people, including many on the right, giddy. Obama is the black JFK. His election would transform, and in some sense redeem, the US . . .

in our own hearts and in the eyes of the world.

His desire to change the priorities of US politics to offer hope to the poor is not the cynical demagogy of a Jesse Jackson but the moral pragmatism of Theodore Roosevelt. Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, is the best-written book by a national political figure in decades. It's also worth a listen . . . the audio version via iTunes lets you hear his own words in his own voice.

Obama's prose is haunting, his power as a storyteller impressive, his grasp of the power of narrative striking.

His account of his fragmented family, troubled adolescence and quest for his own identity is a modern American Odyssey.

As he said in 2004: "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible."

The US has a remarkable . . . let us say exceptional . . .

record in times of trial of producing leaders it does not deserve, who inspire the audacious hope that a better world is possible. Obama may be one of them.