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This is a pivotal moment in America's history and, therefore, that of the world. In a country that forced black people on to separate buses within recent memory, and drove them away from polling stations at elections, the advent of a black president has a resonance that should not be understated. It is easy to be distracted by an event that proves, as the new president-elect said in his victory speech on Tuesday night, that in America anything is now possible, and old bigotries and barriers have finally been broken down. But that is not the sole, or main, significance of what has happened.

America is in economic turmoil. Its place as the world's superpower makes it a magnet for challenges by rogue and aggressive states, and more of these are certain to come - President Medvedev of Russia has already started squaring up to President-elect Obama. Neo-conservatism tried, and largely failed, to deal with those and other lesser challenges over the past eight years. From January, a very different one will be applied. Barack Obama has come this far on a tsunami of rhetoric and charisma. Now he must undertake a responsibility for which those qualities will not necessarily qualify him. He must govern.

Obama benefits from a changing electorate
Mary Riddell: Brown must embrace the new president | More Personal Views
More by Simon Heffer | US election | Eagle Eye
On a balmy election night in the plaza outside the Rockefeller Centre - a skyscraper and estate built in the depths of the last great economic meltdown as an act of defiance towards it - a packed crowd watched Mr Obama's march. Despite the solidity of New York behind the Democrats, there was still no great euphoria - that has been confined to America's equivalent of the chattering classes, and to the new president's home turf in Chicago. There has, though, been an act of faith by the US electorate on a gigantic scale, as it thrusts this unproven and untested man......