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If the next 24 hours don’t see an African American elected President of the United States, I hereby declare my intention to turn to religion, drink, or both.

Why? Because a failure by America’s electorate to give Obama a clear mandate will, once and for all, end any vestige of hope that a democratic system is a pathway to responsible governance.

The choice couldn’t have been made any simpler if the voters had been asked to choose between ketchup and mayo with their fries. It is, for want of a better phrase, a black and white issue.

That’s not to say that one option is right and the other wrong, rather that two is the smallest number in any process that confers choice on the participant and that the alternatives offered on this occasion are so different as to represent something of binary state.

Furthermore, turnout is expected to do justice to a system that gives a country’s citizens the right to vote for their leader. Perhaps this point explains the apathy and general ignorance concerning the election I’ve been encountering among my students in China. Conservatively, 80% of my students had no idea that today was the big day and half of that number thought Barack Obama was either a Japanese card game or the starting forward for the Miami Heat. Their lack of awareness, at least in part attributable to the media policies of an unelected one-party government, is one of the reasons why this one matters a great deal.

America, despite its many imperfections and the transgressions foreign and domestic of the Bush era, remains the only unified counterweight of any substance to China’s ever increasing global influence. The world needs America to begin recovering some disillusioned allies and to acquire (as opposed to regain) the status of ‘responsible stakeholder’ in world affairs. The reason for this is, much to CCP’s glee, eight years of Bush blundering around the globe has seen US respect and clout shoved out the back door of many countries, while at the same time China has jammed an enticing and persistent foot in the same nations’ front doors, not to mention half a dozen despotic regimes that nobody else will do business with.

Democratically elected leaders are not always morally upstanding folk, but they are ultimately accountable to the electorate who help to keep them on a straight path through freedom of expression and the right to vote, two pillars of civilisation that lend themselves to moral responsibility even if they can’t guarantee it. What is certain, however, is that the leaders of any country lacking these two pillars will remain incapable of supporting any moral initiative that doesn’t include obvious financial benefit or geopolitical advantage.

This is the main reason that today’s unfolding election is of such great importance to all of us: like it or not, American standing in the world, and more importantly its relationship with a powerful and resource-hungry China, is going to define the world of the coming decades. This relationship, and the path of humanity, can only be steered in a positive direction by an American president of exceptional intelligence, gravitas, and moral courage who can draw a clear distinction between himself and the last incumbent. Obama is the only candidate who gets a tick in every box.  

Should Obama fail to ride the wave of hope all the way to the Oval Office I’ll be looking for consolation from a bottle of brandy and a preacher. Fortunately, I have every confidence that such desperate measures will prove unnecessary.  Obama won’t find all the answers - the Bush administration has screwed up too badly to allow speedy, across the board solutions. But he can deliver one thing that the whole world badly needs: a presidency that doesn’t look, feel, sound, or act like his predecessor.

Let’s all drink to that.

Update

Well, he did it and he did it in style. And when the job was done he delivered arguably the greatest victory speech of all time. Watch it if you haven’t already. My faith in America and its people is restored. If my students don’t know Obama’s name tomorrow…