The first black president?

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.