So it is Barack Obama. It is also his message of change. Americans may not be sure entirely what precise changes they actually want but their vote Tuesday made it clear what they no longer wanted. They demonstrated they were fed up with eight years of misrule by an inept and ignorant Republican incumbent who has embarrassed his people and compromised his country’s place in world affairs.

The utter euphoria among Democrat voters at their candidate’s victory reminded old hands of the upsurge of vaunting hope that greeted the triumph of John F. Kennedy 48 years ago. As we now know, the 34 months of JFK’s doomed presidency were not in truth the Camelot years imagined at the time. But then why should anyone have expected such a thing? Kennedy was a political animal from a political family.

Obama, though he has proved himself a consummate presidential candidate with arguably one of the most efficient and certainly the most expensive White House campaigns ever mounted, is a largely untried political force. A one-term senator with no experience of any office — it is hardly surprising that Republicans are nervous about the sort of president he will make.

It is, however, instructive that, as shown by the popular and Electoral College votes, the majority of Americans do not care. The US faces daunting financial problems, climate change is bearing down on its profligate energy use and its military is engaged in two deeply unpopular wars. Obama can show no experiential qualifications whatsoever to handle any of these pressing issues. Yet what has clearly earned him the trust of voters is his obvious intelligence, his outstanding articulacy and his apparent honesty and integrity, promising as he has, to always tell it as it is. The contrast with George W. Bush could hardly be greater.

Pundits are hailing the election of America’s first black president as a coming of age for its democracy, a historic turning point. These are probably true but highlighting them obscures a bigger factor. People did not vote to make history.

They voted rather for radical change and Obama’s color, coming on top of all the other qualities that so set him apart from John McCain. And these qualities were many. Only someone like Obama who is as smart and efficient as he is articulate could have trounced McCain so decisively.

The Republican campaign had many faults and the candidate’s age counted against him, but at a time of national crisis McCain alone offered clear track record of legislative and military service to his country. And because he has so often been a Republican renegade, he could distance himself plausibly from the failed George W. Bush. But he still belonged to a party that gave birth to someone like Bush.

McCain’s defeat is, therefore, a defeat not just for the Republicans but for the whole US political establishment at the hands of a complete outsider who now perhaps threatens the cosy Washington consensus. We are, therefore, embarking on exciting times.