For a substantial part of the last eight years it has been impossible to escape the voices of all those who have been telling us that America's democracy was busted - if not fraudulent before even the possibility of being busted - and/or that its population is dominated by know-nothings, bigots, morons. Tuesday blew all this away for the nonsense it is. Some may hope to argue that, because what Tuesday did was to effect a national change of course, it did not so much expose a nonsense as overturn a bad reality and begin the change that would consign this reality to the past. But what Obama said in Chicago ... about seeing America for what it actually is gets the thing right. American democracy hadn't gone missing and neither had the divisions within the US electorate. It didn't require a revolution to elect Barack Obama, a reordering of the entire political constellation; it required only an election at its due time and a campaign to win that election.

And it didn't need a trip to some deep well of recondite wisdom to be able to make this out before 4 November 2008. It needed only some elementary knowledge of US political history and a few basic facts from a textbook in political science. One delusion of the Bush years has been punctured. Others will be punctured in their turn.