The Freedom Tower

The Bush years tainted America’s reputation in the eyes of the world. But London Times Washington correspondent Sarah Baxter who grew up in the US, says the victory of Barack Obama has revealed the nation as it really is. This is her report:

On a beautiful autumn day seven years ago, I stood below the burning towers of the World Trade Center in New York and felt the world spin. The late 20th century’s period of western peace and prosperity had drawn to an end and this, it seemed, was to be its successor – an era of war and danger to compare with the horrors of my parents’ generation.
As I made my way home, shocked and covered in ash and debris from the fallen towers, I felt afraid for my children and the century they would inherit.
Eventually my optimism returned and in the freezing cold last January my husband, Jez, and I took our children out of school to watch Senator Edward Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy brothers, endorse Barack Obama for president.
It wasn’t obvious yet that Obama would win the White House, but he was already making history as the first African-Ameri-can who was in with a chance. He had said all along it was an “improbable” journey for the son of a single mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father, but with a true pioneer spirit he had embarked on it anyway.
We wanted Billie, 11, and Max, 8, to see that America really was a land of opportunity. The Kennedys were quasi-royal, but Obama was a modern 21st-century version of a candidate who was trying to make it from log cabin to White House.
“I was too young to remember John Kennedy and I was just a child when Robert Kennedy ran for president,” Obama said with the old liberal lion of the Senate at his side. “But in the stories I heard growing up, I saw how my grandparents and mother spoke about them and about that period in our nation’s life as a time of great hope and achievement.”
Perhaps that is how our children will remember election day 2008. The politics of hope has vaulted Obama, 47, from unknown Illinois senator to president and commander-in-chief of the world’s super-power in a few short years.
In Grant Park in Chicago, where he gave his victory speech on a surprisingly warm night last Tuesday, the crowd of 125,000 was on an emotional high. Denise Thomas, 38, an African-American from Chicago, told me: “I feel like I’m not here. I am floating on air. He’s a great visionary. He’s got his work cut out, but he’s going to do it. I know it.”
President-elect Obama is about to inherit two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Osama Bin Laden is still at large. The economy is in even worse shape than when it collapsed after 9/11. The threat of terrorism has not receded.
But America feels good about itself and its future again. Its moral standing in the eyes of the world rose overnight. Feizel Mamdoo, my brother-in-law, texted me from Johannesburg: “You’d think South Africa was voting! There are allnight election parties here.”