Foreigners love to criticize the American system for electing a president. They point to the length of the campaign, its absurd cost, the buying of favors with campaign contributions, the relatively low voter turnout, and the complicated and flawed election machinery (with hanging chads and armies of lawyers disputing the results) that produced the unloved Bush administration. And yet when America needs an exceptional leader, the system works. In this election, it worked brilliantly.

America's president-elect is not just a black politician who happens to be a charismatic speaker. He is an exceptional leader – the kind that may appear once in a generation – who happens to be black. Nations sometimes produce great leaders in their hour of need. Think of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Barack Obama has the potential to attain that status.

It is unlikely that he would have made it to the presidency under the systems prevalent in most Western, democratic countries. He began the long race to the White House with no backing, no money and a single speech at the 2004 Democratic convention that marked him as exceptional. If America chose its presidents like France does, for example, the Democratic party grandees would have presented Hillary Clinton to the voters as a take it or leave it choice. Here in Britain, the cradle of parliamentary democracy, the system for electing leaders is even less democratic. Prime Minister Gordon Brown got his job through a deal made with his Labor party colleague, Tony Blair, at a London restaurant more than a decade ago. The two of them simply decided who would take office first.

As it happened, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic party favorite, the anointed candidate, but she ran a shambolic primary campaign that produced a muddled message and endless bickering among her staff.
Senator John McCain – a war hero and a highly likable person with a reputation as a Republican party maverick – made it to the top of the Republican party ticket by refusing to quit in the face of daunting odds. But he also kept changing tactics as he looked for the right message to click with voters. He showed flawed judgement when he chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, and he lost his cool when the stock market crashed.

Senator Obama, on the other hand, ran the best organized campaign I ever saw. He raised phenomenal amounts of money – lots of it from small donors – through highly efficient use of the internet. His message of hope was consistent from start to finish, and when he was confronted with the worst American financial crisis since the Great Depression, he showed a steady and unflappable temperament. He made it to the top through the relentless public scrutiny of a two-year campaign that tested all his rivals and exposed their strengths and weaknesses. Winston Churchill once said that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” I am tempted to say the same thing about America's electoral system. The longest and most expensive presidential campaign in American history produced the best president-elect.

His racial background will make him a role model and a healer at home. That, and his charm and grace will make him an instantly popular American president abroad, after the troubled years of an administration that has made America an international symbol of arrogance and double standards. As a Middle Eastern ambassador told me this week, these past eight years have been “very difficult for America's friends.”

Now the question will be whether this unusual 47-year-old can meet the high hopes and expectations he has raised at home and abroad. The short answer is no. It will simply not be possible to resolve in the next few years all the problems left by the Bush administration. Moreover, America's fundamental national interests will not change. There will be inevitable conflicts of interests with both friends and enemies. But America will present a new face to the world, and a new style. That will be a welcome change.