At first, the possibility of an African-American being elected President of the United States of America was bout as remote as the chances of a Sindhi or a Baloch being elected President or Prime Minister of Pakistan. Since the latter impossibilities have occurred, through Asif Zardari and Zafarullah Jamali, there now appears no reason why Barack Obama should not accomplish the first, to end the year that Zardari began by making historic. The main factor working against Obama is not the brilliance of his opponent, John McCain, who is after all just recycled safety for the Republicans, having come back from defeat by incumbent President George Bush in 2004. Though it has now become out of fashion, where now a declaration of candidacy for the presidency, from either Republicans or Democrats, means a onetime political exercise, with political death following lack of success, there was once a tradition among Democrats of multiple unsuccessful candidacies. Adlai Stevenson comes to mind in the 1950s, and so does William Jennings Bryan, in no less than three elections around the turn of the century. Among Republicans, McCain is in fact not the first candidate to be rejected once for the presidential nomination after challenging an incumbent, but to win the nomination the next time around, and with the nomination, the presidency of the United States. That was Ronald Reagan, who returned the USA to Republican rule after one term of a Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. Reagan, who also presided over the end of communism, and managed to portray it as an American victory, was responsible for two things. First, he established the standards, not only for Republican candidates, but also for Republican presidents as well. Second, he set the stage for the Bush dynasty. The first George was not only his vice-president, but also his successor as president, and had run against him, unsuccessfully of course, in 1980, making his nomination as vice-presidential candidate more within the tradition, where the successful candidate tries to heal the still-fractured party by taking on board his campaign one of his opponents for the nomination. That was the reason for all the talk of Obama nominating Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential nominee, even though she had fought him for the main nomination right down to the wire. As far as the Reagan presidency and the Bushes go, Bush's first (and only) presidency is when and where a still-wild George W cut his political teeth, though until then he had held no political office. (The governorship of Texas lay in the future.) Within this context, the nomination of Sarah Palin by McCain as his vice-presidential candidate appeals to a different level. First, it is an anti-Hillary move, even though that was not needed. Second, the limited numbers of electoral votes from Alaska (three), Palin's home state, have always been solidly Republican. So the Palin nomination only makes sense if it is accepted that McCain alone cannot attract the female voter the way that Palin can. The conventional wisdom is that the American voter is probably ready to elect a black president, especially one as 'white' as Obama. The logic of the US presidency is that only those are successful as appeal sufficiently to Middle America. The real revolution wrought by the younger George Bush is that he won two, not just one, elections while conceding both New York and California states to the Democrats, and then winning everything, more or less, including the Deep South, in between. The previous conventional wisdom had been that anyone who lost both states also lost the election. Bush successfully played the arithmetic, even though he took America through the 2000 election, when he lost the popular vote, and only won the electoral vote because his brother was Governor of Florida, whose electoral votes put over the top after the Chad controversy was resolved by a Supreme Court to which his father had made appointments, and whose judges had children employed by his campaign. Because of those two elections (the second determined by the electoral votes of Ohio state), both the McCain and Obama campaigns have concentrated on a limited number of states, and it seems that the Obama-Biden ticket has a good chance overall. McCain is not being backed by Bush because he will preserve or protect his legacy. McCain will try to make his own mark as president. Neither he nor Obama is campaigning on the plank of ending either the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, but on the basis of greater efficiency in prosecuting the War On Terror. The really important issue is one of which the average American voter is not aware. The American president sits at the head of a spoils system, in which he personally makes thousands of appointments, to all levels of posts in the federal bureaucracy, ranging from Cabinet-level posts to junior slots, like White House drivers. In theory, control is exercised by the Congress, as the Senate is supposed to approve every appointment, but in practice, the relevant Senate committee only acts contrarily on a few major posts. There is thus quite a constituency for these posts. At the moment, all these posts are held by Republicans, or in a lot of cases, usually at the mid-level, which is actually quite senior and policymaking, by sons and daughters of various Republican figures. The purpose of re-electing a Republican is to make sure that these jobs stay in the hands of the incumbents, and that there is a little Musical Chairs, and the same faces have jobs, though perhaps in different departments, or even the same departments. After all, these were jobs that were in the hands of Democrats only eight years ago, and now the Republicans should be expected to fight as hard to save them. That is probably the reason that not enough is being made of the fact that this is perhaps the most important race in American history, but the real issue - the race, or to be more precise, blackness, of one candidate - is not allowed to become a campaign issue. This means that the USA is passing up probably its last chance to confront its violent history, and the wrongs it committed in general, and against Africans in particular. Yet blacks and Hispanics are preparing to vote for Obama, and whites against him, and though the political USA cannot address the issue, the American people realise the enormity of what might happen on Election Day: a black president. True, not a black whose ancestors suffered the historic wrongs that were committed upon an innocent and unaware people, but a black nonetheless. To an extent, Obama has been to blame, because he has not really raised the issue, but he was bound to remain the candidate who played by the rules. The real flaw probably lies in American democracy, which has not taken on this issue as it deserves. E-mail: maniazi@nation.com.pk