Obama’s first days inspire great hope of social and economic renewal but can America afford the promise he embodies? Living as I do in an extended Rooseveltian-Democrat family, in the heavily Democratic state of Connecticut, in the overwhelmingly Democratic city of New Haven, and teaching at undoubtedly liberal Yale University, I had no surprise in witnessing the steadily expanding family excitement as the Obama campaign unfolded. There were also no surprises when, in our local soup kitchen the day after the election, the predominantly African-American clientele was exhilarated, walking around the room and slapping each other’s fists. “You know, prof,” one of them told me, “I made my three young sons watch television all evening long. It was history. I wanted them to talk about this night in 2050.” So they will.

But I was surprised when I sensed that this excitement had filtered across the aisles to my Republican friends. This was partly relief at seeing George Bush and Dick Cheney go and embarrassment at their policies, but it was clearly more than that. One friend, a lifelong Republican with two sons serving in the military, told me he had never been so excited in his life as he was at Obama entering the White House. There is a massive manifestation of human hope that one man can somehow pull this country, and the world outside, out of our present, frightened, battered state. The hope is so manifest because the anxiety is so profound. I have not seen such febrile excitement, whether among my Yale undergraduates or the denizens of the soup kitchen, since I arrived here from Britain 25 years ago (By Paul Kennedy, The Times, January 25, 2009).

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