IN 1976 the United States elected a man with the initials JC as president – Jimmy Carter.

I remember joking at the time, in that silly way that teenagers can get away with, that Americans voted for Jesus Christ (JC, geddit?) every four years.

I guess what I meant was that the winner is so often built up to be some sort of super hero. Carter didn't walk on water, though, for long.

What about the Democrats' candidate this time, Barack Obama? Is he another Jack Kennedy (assuming he is elected president tomorrow, Nov 4)? Or another Franklin Roosevelt?

If Obama gets into the White House, without a doubt he'll have the world on his shoulders. For a start, the world's non-Americans – that's still a majority of us – will be looking to him to get us out of Iraq, out of further commitments such as taking on Iran, and out of the Global Credit Crisis.

Americans, too, will be expecting him to do what, in fairness, even my hero, Roosevelt, couldn't really do, which is to fix the country's many economic woes. (FDR did his best, God knows, to lift the States out of depression. But it was the industrial requirements of the Second World War wot done it in the end, as the Sun newspaper might have said) But it doesn't stop there. Obama is going to be expected to work all sorts of miracles in America and across the globe – and, all the while, champion the rights and aspirations of African-Americans without riling suspicious whites who voted for him, maybe, but won't wait long for a chance to dump him (or worse).

No outcome is as scary as winning. I wonder what America and the world will make of Obama when his feet turn out to be made of as much clay as anyone else's.