My neighbour in Dehiwala got himself sloshed on euphoria and Black Label even before the fist results from the US East Coast arrived. It will take days to get inspired millions of his ilk off the floor, cleaned up and back on the settee. The last time such celebrations erupted across many lands, I am told, was VE Day ending World War II in Europe. Nobody wants to spoil a party and I for one promptly popped the cork on a bottle of Champagne to greet the president-elect; but isn’t it time to sober up and take stock?

What does this victory of a black American intellectual elitist – his ‘Dreams of my Father’ captivated me the most of the books I read in 2008 - with a finely tuned cultural and historical sensibility signal? It would be hyperbole to say that America has finally settled its accounts with slavery; no way, that account will never be settled. One must to be more temperate in judgement, though the rise of a black American to the pinnacle attests to a democratic maturity that we in Lanka are still light-years away from achieving. It signals a certain intellectual growing up of America, interrupted by the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and a challenge that Bill Clinton could not fully rise to; and when a country with the material, cultural and military influence of America takes a step forward, it matters in every corner of the modern world. To put it in my kind of jargon: ‘When America goes socialist, world socialism has more or less arrived, therefore, even small progressive steps to enthuse its people are priceless’.

True America and the world breathed a sigh of relief on November 4, but only a door opened, a journey commenced. The problem is that the root of the global financial debacle is not blunders by individuals who can be fired, nor the folly of banks and derivative markets that can be quickly regulated away, though these were aplenty. No, it lies in the nature of capitalism; the intrinsic contradictions that drive it to periodic catastrophic crashes could not have been averted by individuals or organisations – Washington, Brussels, banks, markets or clever analysts. Any force impeding asset and credit bubbles or obstructing risky derivatives as capitalism boomed through the late 20th Century would have been buried by titanic forces. For once we cannot blame Bush; financial and systemic forces an order of magnitude more powerful than any president or administration, were at work. "The notion that Greenspan could have generated a totally different outcome is naïve," says Robert Hall a Stanford economist. If the credit explosion and derivatives driven financial engineering were brought to a halt, a worldwide fall in profit and a prolonged crisis would have arrived sooner. Greenspan says in his new book: "Governments and central banks could not have altered the course of the boom" – nor could they have averted the subsequent bust.

Obama cannot tame the global crisis with the wave of a magic wand; rather, it is ironic that America had to choose this black man as its best hope to reach out to a hostile world for understanding in salvaging its own future. Had it been McCain, cobbling together a global alliance that included Asia, the Petro Middle East and Latin America would have faced insurmountable obstacles. Wall Street’s new blood capitalists, technology companies and the university campuses were the largest corporate contributors to Obama’s campaign. He represents the shining new face of American democracy; but as the world sails into uncharted waters circumstances may push him further than corporate America wants.

Alongside this uncertain picture the Obama campaign has set in motion forces that cannot be contained without a struggle. A populist genie is out of the bottle and society is far different from the old days. The tens of millions who swarmed out believing that history is being made cannot be bottled in again - not without a fight anyway. How will old corporate capitalism, Christian fundamentalism, traditional America and a reactionary white working class fare against an educated middle-class that has lost its life-savings, young faces turned towards change and energised minorities? The big uncertain is the large self-employed class (Joe the plumber). Let us keep our eyes on all these socio-political variables, not just Obama.

Obama theorists have coined the term post-partisanship to project an ideal that is beyond bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is the virtue of Democrats and Republicans cooperating, but post-partisan is to go beyond to a brave new world in which cooperation is the seamless order of things. However, it is not Democrat and Republican politicians getting together that is important; rather the intervention of people themselves in shaping the world is the need of the hour. And it not just the American people, it is the global public; to adjust a famous old formula "People of the World Unite!"

Although there is talk of Paulson (Treasury) and Gates (Defence) staying on it is opposed by Obama’s advisors. The media has highlighted some names, but the president-elect has a splendid talent pool to choose from. Hence, the list below may not be even half right. (The American cabinet is 15, which is about 95 less than Lanka’s 110, or a personnel ratio of 1:7.3; the GDP ratio of the two countries, inversely, is 430:1, an overall aberration by a factor of 3150).

White House Chief of Staff (crucial non-cabinet post): Rahm Emanuel or Tom Daselie

State: Bill Richardson or Richard Lugar

Treasury: Timothy Geithner, Sheila Blair or Larry Summers

Defense: Chuck Hagel, Richard Danzig or Gen. Wes Clark

Health & Human Services: Kathleen Sebelius, Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean

When the cabinet is known it will be necessary to trawl through pedigrees since this is the most important administration in recent American history. Hilary Clinton as Secretary for Health would signal a commitment to the most important single issue of the first term, but she is a powerful personality able to overshadow the president; this could be a concern. She has also been mentioned for one of three Supreme Court vacancies expected during the first term.

The biggest challenge and greatest opportunities lie in healthcare reform. The United States spends $6,000 per individual per year, the highest in the world, if you add up government, employer and personal expenditure. The government contribution on Medicare and Medicate alone is nearly 5% of the federal budget. Canada, Australia, France, Japan and Britain provide far superior universal or near universal healthcare for less than half the percapita outlay. Forty million people in the richest nation in the world have little or no cover, medical and hospital facilities are wasteful and woefully expensive. Public sector involvement is taboo and what exists is like a municipal lavatory. The medical industry and the heath insurance industry make a killing (pun intended), ably abetted by the legal industry – all three, branches of corporate America.

Obama’s healthcare programme is not intended to overcome any of this; that would need a revolution. The power of the American medical-insurance-legal complex is on a par with that of the military-industrial complex, neither can be tamed short of a systemic overhaul; a transformation of American society. The more modest target that Obama’s healthcare programme promised is to quickly widen coverage; that is, he will bring most of the forty million within the umbrella. The system side of the proposals are to increase emphasis on public health and prevention, increase home-based initiatives, reduce drug prices, modernise management, and enhance IT penetration to cut costs. Not flamboyant but excellent.

The plan will cost about $60 billion annually (plus $100 billion upfront) and Obama hopes to find the money by raising taxes on high-end earners and on windfall profits, such as oil company revenues. If windfall revenues don’t materialise, in a recession for example, the plan will require inflationary public sector deficit spending.

The Social Security trust fund is a government pool into which contributions are made by employees and employers and monthly benefits drawn by those over age 65. There are two problems, demographics and government borrowing. The population is aging and by 2017 inflow into the fund from a declining number of active workers will be less than the outflow needed to pay stipends to an increasing number of retirees. The annual payments in 2008 amount to $600 billion (the largest single item in the federal budget) but below inflow by $180 billion. The equation reverses in 2017 and then deteriorates unless changes are made. By 2041 the fund will be insolvent and then inflows will cover only 78% of payment obligations.

There is another challenge. The fund has ‘lent’ $2.2 trillion to the government since all its assets are held in government bonds; this is projected to rise to $4.3 trillion by 2017. Payment to retirees after 2017, therefore, will be contingent on the government taking back its paper and settling the loans it has helped itself to, but it can’t; Uncle Sam is broke! So rev up the printing press and refund play money – what else to do? It’s much worse for schemes that invested in private equities (a popular one is called 401k), and now equities have crashed.

On all sides it is a difficult transition but also full of possibilities. We must not stand aside in scholarly indifference, it is time to intervene wherever we live; after all it’s one world.