These are times when everything is measured against prior expectations, when tomorrow's news was discounted yesterday, and when to be anything but cynical is to be credulous. So perhaps we should not get too excited by the long-awaited confirmation that Barack Obama will lead the Democratic party into this November's presidential election.
We have known for many weeks - some would say months - that the senator from Illinois would win his party's race. The big question has been when, and how, Hillary Clinton would reconcile herself to defeat. We have already the answer.
As for Mr Obama, surely he has lost his shine. His victory in Iowa, 50-odd primaries ago, mesmerised the world well beyond the US. The vaulting rhetoric, the legions drawn in from beyond politics, the ringing appeal for America to change: politics, it seemed, had been turned on its head.
January was a lifetime ago. Familiarity has taken its toll. The fact that Mr Obama is black no longer seems, well, quite so extraordinary. After months in the trenches against Mrs Clinton, the man bidding to be the first African-American to win the White House now has some political mud on his shoes.
He has learned along the way that middle America has more pressing concerns than the price of arugula; that he had better learn to bowl before staging photo-opportunities in a bowling alley; and that it is unwise to denigrate the cultural conservatism of small-town America. As for inspiration, it does not pay the bills. Casting himself as the candidate who transcended old divisions, he has been forced to dump the less temperate black pastor who had been almost a surrogate father. He has found it much tougher to win over white blue-collar workers than to impress the latte-drinking intelligentsia. Mr Obama, the rest of us now know, has his blemishes.
The primaries took their toll. The Republicans' John McCain will not have to mention his opponent's skin colour to stir old prejudices among some white voters. He can take his cue from Geraldine Ferraro, a former vice-presidential candidate and supporter of Mrs Clinton. "If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being a racist," she said the other day. "They [working class whites] don't identify with someone who has gone to Harvard and Columbia Law School and is married to a Harvard-Princeton graduate".
Mr Obama in other words is damned as part of the liberal elite. Never mind he is the son of an absent father and was raised by a mother reliant on welfare. Or for that matter that Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain both had far more privileged starts in life. Mr Obama could not haul in the white votes in the swing states.
There is an unspoken connection here between colour and class. Presidential elections are about character as well as policy. Voters, I heard one Washington insider say the other day, want a president who looks comfortable at a country and western show. Could the black Mr Obama ease himself in to such a picture?
A Clinton candidacy, of course, would also have broken the political mould. But if she played to her gender from time to time, Mrs Clinton preferred the class card. What America needed was a president ready to roll up her sleeves from day one, someone of experience, and someone in tune above all with the hardships faced by the white working class. Mr McCain, if he so chooses, need only pick up the Ferraro-Clinton baton.
The burning hope was that Mr Obama's candidacy would snuff out the fires of racial division. But wait, the sceptics say, look at what happened in the smokestack states and the wilds of the Appalachians: he got the blacks, she got the white working classes. They have a point. Had the fiery views of the Reverend Wright, Mr Obama's erstwhile pastor, been made known three or four months earlier, Mrs Clinton quite possibly would now be the nominee.
All this, and Mr Obama could well lose to Mr McCain in November. If this is not the Democrats' year there never will be one. Every indicator of opinion says that the voters want change. The Republican brand is tainted. Yet the same polls say that Mr McCain fares much better than his party. Might not America give the Democrats a tighter grip on Congress but hedge its bets by sending a Republican to the White House?
Mr McCain is less constant than admirers allow - witness his volte-face on tax cuts. He has an explosive temper, and he is wrong about Iraq. Yet, however much Mr Obama says otherwise, Mr McCain does not look like a clone of George W. Bush.
So there you have it: half a dozen or more good reasons to suppress any lingering sense of excitement about the coming fight between a 46-year-old African-American and a 71-year-old son of an admiral and former prisoner in Vietnam's Hanoi Hilton. Forgive my credulousness, but this is a truly momentous election. The candidates may also decide to make it an honest one: Mr McCain pitching experience, judgment and independence against Mr Obama's vision of a different America.
For all the recent air of wearing inevitability, it is no less startling now than it was five months ago that a first-term senator defeated the might of the Clinton machine to win the Democratic nomination. In spite of those reluctant blue-collar voters, Mr Obama has fought the campaign he promised - the first by an African- American that has risen above race.
Lest we forget, it is extraordinary also that Mr McCain, discounted last year as a maverick going nowhere, has won the nomination of a party that has never fully trusted him.
The circumstances of their primary victories mean that Mr Obama and Mr McCain are both obliged to fight a different sort of general election. They must reach voters well beyond traditional party lines rather than, as did Mr Bush, rely on mobilising their political bases. Mr Obama needs the millions of voters he has brought into politics for the first time; Mr McCain independents and Reagan Democrats. America, with luck, can say goodbye to the crude culture wars that have scarred its politics since the 1960s.
The gifted Mr Obama is a once-in-a-generation politician; Mr McCain a worthy opponent. The choice their candidacies pose about America's place in the world is one that the sole superpower has been slow to acknowledge. Whoever wins will have to break with the delusions of the past seven years.
That is why the election is being more closely watched beyond America's shores than any I can think of. The world would dearly love a vote in this, yes, epic contest, but will content itself with a ringside seat. (Under syndication arrangement with FE)
