IT was, without question, the hardest job I have ever done and I lasted barely half-an-hour.

Twenty-odd years ago I was living and working in North Carolina and, as an introduction to the tobacco industry, I sat on a giant tractor in stifling heat picking tobacco leaves.

A tobacco leaf is a formidable opponent, it's long and heavy and attached to the plant's stork by thick stems. There were thousands of them which all needed picking but it was such punishing and relentless work that it saw me off very quickly.

Not so, though, the couple of dozen regular farm workers who still had a 10-hour, wrist-breaking day ahead. And incidentally, there was not one white face amongst them.

Back then race, if not racism, touched daily life in North Carolina. I soon discovered that in the small town where I was staying, whites were in one part and blacks lived on 'the other side of the tracks'. Socially, the two seldom mixed and, for that reason, I always felt a party to hypocrisy when I sat in an almost exclusively white crowd as it cheered on an almost exclusively black college football team. While the UK was far from enlightened in the 80s, I felt as if I'd stepped back in time.

While North Carolina has a shameful record of Ku Klux Klan activity and, in real terms, only allowed a free black vote in the 1960s it is also a state with a pioneering civil rights movement. In 1960, four black freshers from the State University sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworths in Greensboro and were refused service. They stayed there, peacefully, until the store closed.

Their actions sparked a series of similar protests across the Deep South until, six months later, Woolworth's integrated all of its stores.

So it is with that relatively recent history in mind that I found Barack Obama's victory even more stunning. North Carolina has only voted for a Democrat once in the past forty years and not at all for the last 28. But last week they changed that.

A state with a dubious record on race and a state where white faces still outnumber black, put its trust in Obama.

But while the US embracing its first back president is momentous in so many ways, there is another reason to be uplifted by Obama's victory and it has nothing to do with the colour of his skin.

Here is a brilliant orator, a sharp mind in a sharp suit. In short, Obama looks good and is the embodiment of cool. He has energised American youngsters to vote in their millions and his impact on the world stage might even stir teenagers here in the UK to do the same.

Not so long ago, a 25-year-old friend of mine said she was not that interested in politics, she had never voted and couldn't be bothered.

On further interrogation it became clear she had very strong views on education, council tax and public transport among many other issues. "That," I pointed out, "is exactly what politics is all about, not the shallow, soundbite nonsense you get at Prime Minister's Questions." She's now a convert. Given the lack of role models currently sitting in Westminster I'm hoping that Barack Obama will help convert many more.