45 years after Luther King the dream is still alive.....

For once it is not hyperbole to use the word 'historic'. Forty-five years after Martin Luther King delivered his impassioned speech - that resonated around the world and became known by the short-hand I Have a Dream - in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a young African-American has stepped on a stage at a football stadium in Denver Colorado and accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the Presidency of the United States. Barack Obama, of Kansas and Kenyan parentage, has lived the American ideal and embodies the dream itself - that anything is possible in America with hard work, belief and opportunity. A young, articulate, idealistic, mellifluous, brilliant black man has a chance of becoming the next President of the United States of America. He has risen from community organiser in the South Side of Chicago to the first African-American chair of the prestigious and influential Harvard Law Review and via a stint at the Illinois State legislature to be elected junior Senator for the State of Illinois in the US Congress. This man, who grew up in difficult circumstances with an absent father and a mother faced with major economic and social challenges with the family moving from Indonesia to Hawaii and grandparents having a major input into his upbringing, emobodies what is possible in America.

Politically he represents change from the Bush era and the old, exhausted, bankrupt non-solutions to the problems of the US and the world. Biographically, his is the story that the American elecrorate may wish to have reflected back at them to show them and the world at their best. One of the themes of Obama's book Dreams From My Father, which chronicles his early life and struggles, is that the problems encountered along the way - racial and other prejudice - are not about him and him alone: 'it is not just about you' resounds through the book. And on that platform in Denver Obama echoed that message as he told his audience - both in and outside the stadium - that in the end his candidacy is about them and not him. If they have a vision of themselves reflected in him, he could occupy the White House in 2009. In framing who they are, Americans often re-visit the words of the founding fathers of the Republic as laid down in the Constitution - we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are made by their Creator equal......and certain inalienable rights among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... What a manifesto for change. In the words of the Obama team - yes he can.