Unyielding hope

One of Robert F. Kennedy’s favourite passages of poetry was drawn from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘Come, my friends,/ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world./ Push off, and sitting well in order smite/ The sounding furrows… strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ On 4 November, the American people decided unambiguously to embrace that spirit of hope. Like Ulysses in the poem, John McCain embodied the doughty virtues of the veteran warrior. But it was the chance to ‘seek a newer world’ — the mesmeric promise of ‘change’ — that America voted for in its overwhelming endorsement of Senator Barack Obama.

Throughout his campaign, the President-elect used Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of August 1963 as an inspiration and a template. Like Dr King, he reminded America repeatedly of ‘the fierce urgency of now’. And in his own biography — the son of a Kenyan goatherd who rose to the most powerful office in the world — he has confronted the challenge set 45 years ago that ‘we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one’.