It is easy to overstate what next Tuesday means for those of us outside of the US. In the last four years we have seen the meteoric rise of China and India with the other two so-called BRIC countries, Brazil and Russia, also gradually chipping away at US hegemony. But in reality this is still the big one – the only time the world stops and looks on fascinated but powerless like armchair football fans.

On Tuesday – it’s always a Tuesday – up to 150 million Americans will go to the polls. The vastness of the spectacle, the sheer improbability of democracy fanning out to incorporate so many people is in itself incredible. But this time the US election has myriad factors laced together making it even more enthralling. Even before we look at Obama and McCain there are already intriguing quirks which have been barely mentioned about Election 08.

Both running mates carry history on their shoulders. Sarah Palin is the first ever female running mate on a Republican ticket. And while Geraldine Ferraro preceded her to be the first female on a presidential ticket in 1984, should John McCain win next week, Sarah Palin will become the first ever female to enter the White House. Joe Biden will also become a trailblazer of sorts if elected next week. Forty eight years after Catholics huddled round TV sets from Brooklyn to South Boston, or for that matter from Dublin to Dagenham, to see if America would vote for a Catholic, Biden will attempt to be only the second Catholic to hold presidential office and the first ever to be sworn in as vice-president.

The election is itself notable due to the fact that neither the incumbent president nor vice-president is running for office, the first time this has happened since 1952. Also, both presidential candidates are current serving senators, something which has never happened before in presidential election history. This also means that either McCain or Obama will be the first man to move from the Senate to the White House since Kennedy in 1960.

These stats, however, are mere window dressing to what could be waiting for us at the other side of the ballot box. Should Obama win next week, the political and cultural shift in America will be palpable. The US at present is in a malaise; it is more polarised than at any point since the civil war and the country is subsumed by splits over issues ranging wildly from abortion, to national defence, to the economy. Four years ago, as the final Progress magazine went to press, there was a real feeling that by offering a positive message John Kerry could override partisan differences and win the presidency. In the end George W Bush managed to destroy Kerry in the final weeks of the campaign by ruthlessly exploiting people’s fear of change over continuity – but four years later Obama is ruthlessly exploiting people’s desperation for the very thing they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for in 2004 and with less than a week to go it looks like working.

If, however, McCain scrapes in to the presidency there will be no culture shift. In his defence, McCain will surely be a better leader than Bush. His record, not least on issues such as the use of torture or in fact immigration, is admirable. And it is only four years ago that he was being touted, however tenuously, as a potential Democratic running mate. But away from niche issues McCain has been revealed as remarkably similar to the current incumbent. He has a few maverick votes to shout about, not least his position as only one of two Senate Republicans to vote against a newly elected President Bush’s $1.3tr tax cut package in his first year in office. But in truth he has towed the line on the economy, not least because it is simply not his forte.

Unfortunately for him America needs some one who is going to be imaginative right now. McCain will not be able to address the economic problems in America; he will also fail to stem the cultural and political disquiet in the country. He will be a prisoner to those who squeezed him in to Washington, the Christian and conservative right of the Republican party, a bloc which has ruled the roost for four if not eight years and a voting group that the GOP desperately relies on in modern America as mainstream white working-class voters haemorrhage from the party.

The contrast couldn’t be greater if Obama should claim victory. If elected the truisms will rush in barely before we have cleared our hangovers; Obama will change America. It will mark the point at which practical imperatives and common sense will have trumped bigotry and bloody mindedness. Political analysts even have a geeky take on this, claiming that late September was the point at which opinion polls began to show the economy was outweighing issues of race in determining which way people would vote.

The bottom line is that, even if only by a whisker, an Obama victory would highlight a willingness among a majority of Americans to give an African-American the role of commander-and-chief. Furthermore, it would mark the enfranchisement and empowerment of millions of African-Americans and mark them out as a new and formidable voting bloc. It would also signal a realignment of American white-working class voters behind the Democratic party due to economic concerns and a move away from an eight year flirtation with the Republican party largely – at least since 2004 – based on a warped sense of nationalism and security.

Obama will also bring a break from a political establishment which has infected the US for eight years. Bush is now the most unpopular president in history in terms of approval ratings – even outdoing Nixon. He has presided over the greatest economic crisis since the 1929 crash and has sent US troops to fight in Iraq on a mandate that has now proved utterly erroneous. But it is arguably the internal malaise he has left behind within the US that is most depressing. Obama will have to reconcile a country where the centre doesn’t know the coast and vice versa. Whether you are Republican or Democrat it is surely clear that the vast cultural and political chasm between America’s coastal states and its vast central hinterland is not healthy.

Obama must not rest on his laurels and relax on his support base as Bush has done since 2004. Obama must attempt to appeal to rural Americans, to US citizens in the south in places like Louisiana and Georgia and to those in the north in places like Colorado, states that are open to new ideas and new trends, all are states that have been willing to vote Democrat in the not too distant past. But this is not just electorally imperative for Obama if he wants to win again in 2012; it is the right thing to do for America, a country in need of unity.

Perhaps, finally, it is worth mentioning what an Obama win would mean for us. Policy wise the list is potentially endless, he is a multilateralist, he wants to re-engage with the world. And, of course, he will change direction in Iraq with an almost certain timetable for pulling troops out. He will surely also look at Europe in a more constructive light than his predecessor. But in general the majority of his foreign policy platforms are not too dissimilar to those of Kerry four years ago. What is more important is that an Obama win will let Europe exhale with relief and rekindle their admiration and fascination with the US. This is not a party political issue, Tory and Labour supporters love the US with equal passion if for different reasons. But both have turned away from the States since 2000. Obama will make it acceptable to love America again. Until next week, however, we will have to hold our breath.