From the editor’s desk

Good news across the pond

The most interesting American presidential primary contest in living memory has drawn to a close, with an outcome that 12 months ago would have seemed truly extraordinary. The young Illinois Senator Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother American, has pipped Hillary Clinton, former First Lady and clear favourite last year, to the finishing post, represented by winning a total of 2,118 or more committed delegates to the Democratic National Convention later this summer. The Democratic primary contest was a collision of two kinds of American dream - that a woman could overcome discrimination against her gender to reach the highest office in the United States, and that a mixed-race American could overcome racial prejudice to achieve the same goal. And it is Senator Obama who has won the right to make that bid next November, although a political alliance with Senator Clinton has still to be negotiated in order to bring her and her supporters over to his side. A place as his running mate might be offered, if she wants it.

The simple image of a black American president would transform America's sour relations with the rest of the world at one glance. If racial division and disharmony is the single most important issue facing America today, as many Americans would recognise, this result opens a dramatic new chapter there too. Even the Republican contender, Senator John McCain, admits, to the discomfort of many in his own party, that America needs healing after the Bush years. The planet's most prosperous nation is also one of the most unequal, with infant mortality, for instance, higher than anywhere else in the Western world due to the poverty and the lack of affordable health care among poor black and Hispanic minorities.

Religion has played a very different role so far from the Bush-Kerry contest of four years ago. Then, Catholic leaders fell in with Republican efforts to drive a wedge between the Democrats and their traditional Catholic constituency, in the expectation that George Bush would do something about abortion. But he failed to deliver, and there is a discernible inclination among conservative religious forces, now a little wiser, to stand clear of the political battle this time. But religion is never far below the surface in American politics. Senator Obama had to dig himself out of trouble when first the firebrand black preacher, the Revd Jeremiah Wright, and then from the same Chicago pulpit the outspoken Catholic priest Fr Michael Pfleger, offered him a poisoned embrace by racialising the issues in the fight with Senator Clinton. Fr Pfleger was told by his bishop, Cardinal Francis George, to mind his own business. Mr Obama has been trying to portray himself not as a black candidate but as one for all Americans, and the well-publicised sermons of Mr Wright and Fr Pfleger undermined this message. Senator Obama has now resigned from Mr Wright's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, where this all happened.

Not the least important outcome of the campaign so far is the emphatic repudiation, by both Republican and Democrat electorates, of the Bush legacy, particularly over Iraq. So the self-correcting mechanisms of American political life still seem to be in working order, and that is the most encouraging news from across the Atlantic for some while.