Now that the understandable euphoria has subsided, we need to take a long hard look at the prospects for real change once President Obama gets down to work.
As Tom Clark writes, "we know that he will never step too far away from an American centre ground which, for European social democrats, will still seem a dispiriting place."
Yep, the man who represents the biggest shift in American politics since the election of John Kennedy is sufficiently far to the right to dispirit European social democrats, themselves a pretty uninspiring bunch who have long since given up on the notion that a successful economy is one that provides jobs for all. It's hard to believe that when Kennedy was elected, the principal objective of economic policy was full employment. Today such lofty ideals are anathema to mainstream politics.
There are almost as many reasons to be sceptical about the Obama future as there are to celebrate the end of the Bush administration. Little mention has been made of the fact that despite a record turnout, only a third of Americans eligible to vote were sufficiently inspired by Obama's vision of change to actually vote for him. This may compare favourably with the way George W. Bush snuck into the White House in 2000 with the support of less than a quarter of eligible voters, but it still raises questions about the extent of Obama's democratic mandate.
Despite the advance of democratic politics over the last century, real power still lies elsewhere. Interviewed by the BBC this week, Rupert Murdoch, while acknowledging that spending time with Obama was "enjoyable and interesting", expressed his fear that he might take "us in a different and dangerous direction". He went on to raise the spectre of Obama reviving US protectionism.
Murdoch opposes protectionism because he knows it would deal a hammer blow to his continued ability to accumulate wealth and power. He might argue that free trade is the best way to lift the economically excluded out of poverty, but the overwhelming evidence, three decades into the globalisation project, is that while people like Murdoch have become much richer, the poverty of the bottom billion of the world's people has become more deeply entrenched.
While it's encouraging that Obama could win without Murdoch's endorsement, by attempting demonise him so quickly Murdoch is sending a deliberate message to his associates in the global elite that this man is not to be trusted. Had two-thirds of Americans supported an Obama presidency Murdoch might have been persuaded to keep his head down. As things stand, I suspect he has little to worry about. If Obama is starting out from a dispiritingly centrist position, he will be pushed further to the right by the power of vested interests.
On Wednesday's evening, Congressman Jim Clyburn told Jeremy Paxman that Obama's election was only a small step in the right direction. Clyburn knows from long experience that there's a great deal more to a creating a just society than equality in civil and political rights.
In an economy that has always favoured elite wealth and power, the election of a black man as President does not imply a world of genuine equal opportunity. The fact that anyone can be elected president does not mean that everyone can attain a minimum level of economic security. Even in South Africa, where the ANC government has had a massive popular mandate since it was first elected in 1994 and presided over a decade a steady economic growth, the economic situation of many black (and white) South Africans has deteriorated.
If one thing has changed in the last few decades it is this: traditionally, the only way for self-labelling groups of human beings to wield power over other such groups was to discriminate against them on the basis of race, gender or differences in cultural and religious practices. We may have taken great strides in transcending these absurd prejudices, but today that function is left to an economic system which, instead of discriminating against national minorities - a process which required iniquitous legislation and routine violence - now discriminates against a global majority in ways which are so embedded in social and economic institutions, that they are almost impossible to counter.
Progress towards a more just global order is impossible without wholesale reform of the economic system. Despite clear evidence in the last few weeks that the underlying causes of social injustice and chronic economic instability are intimately linked, there is still remarkably little political appetite to tackle them. At best, Obama's victory creates a more conducive environment in which to continue the struggle for a more sane and inclusive world. But that's probably the extent of it.