So now that Democratic Senator Barack Obama is the unquestioned “presumptive Democratic party presidential nominee” and could well wind up in the White House he has made history and could make even more history. Right?

Correct — except he could make history in more ways than one. Andrew Sullivan has written several pieces now that put Obama’s candidacy into a special context. Sullivan more than any other commentator has caught onto how Obama’s emergence has been historical in several ways:

1. Obama has made history by being the first black Democratic party presidential nominee and could become the first African-American to serve as President. That much is universally acknowledged.
2. As Sullivan has pointed out for several months now, however, although Obama is just on the edge of being a Baby Boomer, he is in fact in political orientation, outlook and style representative of the post-Baby Boomer generations — younger Americans who are not stuck on having a divisive mindset and battling battles stemming from blood-raw political divisions of the 1960s.
3. Obama is a TV “cool” candidate in a field of TV “hot” image candidates.

In his latest Sunday Times column, Sullivan takes a look at Obama, his role and how his candidacy could mark a political watershed. It’s worth taking a longer look at it. So here are some excerpts with a few comments:

I wonder if Americans have yet fully absorbed what they have just done. This past week - 41 years after the Supreme Court struck down the last bans on interracial marriage and only 40 years after black America exploded in riots after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated - a black man became the favourite to be the next president of the United States.

His convention acceptance speech, a date scheduled long before Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, will occur by exquisite timing 45 years to the day after King’s “I have a dream” speech. The states that were critical to his nomination were Illinois, Lincoln’s home state, and the four southern states most associated with slavery: South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of how Obama’s rise changes America’s relationship to the rest of the world. What has been less appreciated is how deeply Obama’s victory alters America’s relationship to itself.

Sullivan looks at the issues of race and slavery in American politics. But his take isn’t quite what everyone would expect:

Obama is not just potentially America’s first black president. He would be America’s first bi-racial president, in many ways a more integrative event. The cynics demand that we cease this kind of historical hyper-ventilation. It is deemed a function of drinking the Obama Kool-Aid, of insufficient scepticism, of Obamania.

But you have to have a heart of stone not to see what this has already done to race relations in America.

He recounts the impact of the appearance of Obama, who at first was considered — even by Republicans — as someone who was campaigning NOT as a black man running for President but a man running for President who happened to be black. It took some of Obama’s political foes to throw in the monkey wrench to try and redefine him later on.

And, Sullivan notes, if Obama gets to the White House he’ll owe it to one current politician — George Bush. Sullivan’s point is well taken. Keep in mind that early on Hillary Clinton’s advisers decided to have her run as the one with “experience” …almost as an incumbent…the one with inside experience.

But George Bush made many voters thirst for a political option that wasn’t tainted by excessive inside-the-beltway-ism, someone who didn’t seem like an incumbent, and someone who didn’t seem to be from another recent page in American political history:

OBAMA owes this opportunity first and foremost to George W Bush. Without Bush there would be no Obama. Without the disastrous mismanagement of Iraq abroad and hurricane Kat-rina at home, the logic for a transformational candidacy such as Obama’s would never have added up.

Without the shame of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, of torture and abuse of executive power, of mounting debt and accelerating inequality, the movement for truly radical change would never have taken off the way it has. Without the uniquely divisive politics of Karl Rove, who turned cultural and religious polarisation into an art form and 51% of the vote into a mandate for even more polarisation, there would be no unrequited desire for a new kind of politics.

Indeed: Rove’s political style has been the great grand child of 1960s polarization and Richard Nixon’s divisive “silent majority” and southern strategies. It was slice and dice — divide and rule, confront and politically collect.

And then, Sullivan notes, Obama was helped by the Clintons. He recounts Hillary’s “inevitability” early on — and details why this was not just the prevailing view but from the standpoint of hard-nosed politics a logical conclusion. Sullivan summarizes the campaign, Obama’s weaknesses and what the GOP intends to use against him. He analyzes key voting blocks, the Democratic Vice Presidential sweepstakes, and what the Republicans face in their race against him.

And then he puts the finger on it — that key factor that politicians can’t fake and few have:

Then there is the unknowable factor of Obama’s star power. No presidential candidate in modern times has drawn 75,000 people out for a primary election rally, as he did in Portland last month. No one has inspired the dozens of songs, anthems, YouTube videos and poster art that this figure has.

Obama has something that Reagan and John F Kennedy had: a charisma that seems to fit the presidency. And he is obviously more Kennedy than Reagan, with youth on his side. Give the American presidency the allure of youth and testosterone and it is an intoxicating mass media phenomenon. His personality could do for it what Kennedy did, what John Paul II did for the institution of the papacy in his first years and what Diana did for the institution of the monarchy: it’s a fusion of op-cultural mass appeal with highly authoritative institutions.

The theatre of this is unmissable. What was previously a theory - a fantasy of a redeemed, rebranded America – gains real traction now that Obama is the actual nominee. As the moment approaches when he could be president, that power will only intensify.

But there could be dangers for Obama:

It will require careful management if it is not to degenerate into cultism and messianism. But what Obama has is what Kennedy had and Diana famously didn’t: a cool and measured interior. What makes the phenomenon sustainable is this odd mix of hot and cool, of intense emotional energy around this man, centred on a very calm and collected, even aloof, individual. THIS has been an emotionally cathartic and draining primary season and yet through much of it, as Clinton went up and down on an emotional rollercoaster, as the media swooned and gasped and groaned, as pundits offered every conceivable gambit and interpretation, Obama’s team kept steady, made few errors, took few massive risks and never succumbed to the kind of slash-and-burn politics they were running against.

Obama has the ability to rouse enormous emotion while seeming almost casual and meditative at its centre. The diplomatic skill with which he has been handling the delicate matter of the Clinton ego is a wonder to behold.

AND:

This last thought is the core meaning of Obama’s candidacy. That this meaning cannot be fleshed out in full policy detail without losing something is revealing. It’s an inherently ineffable and unreasonable notion that America does represent something new and hopeful for every generation, that it somehow encapsulates an idealism ill at ease in a more chastened old world.

This elusive quality made us remember Kennedy, even though he served (rashly) for only three years. It made us remember Reagan, another aloof figure like Obama liable to arouse mass enthusiasm. It has already given the Obama campaign an aura unlike any since 1980. It can be marshalled responsibly and irresponsibly; the trouble is that it is impossible to know for sure in advance whether it will end in disappointment or renewal.

When Clinton and, recently, John McCain belittled the appeal of a candidate who can communicate via speeches and who transmits through the media a cool assurance, they’re missing the point — and turning their lemon into a glass of decaying lemon juice.

It isn’t the speech itself that can make a candidate. It’s a candidate’s ability to communicate a vision of the future in a way that transcends microphones and cameras rather than rattling off a list of legislation or promises that can make a candidate or public figure more than an ordinary one.

JFK had it. RFK had it. Reagan had it. Martin Luther King, Jr. had it. John McCain in his 2000 appearances being swamped by college students had it. Hillary Clinton’s speech on Saturday in content and delivery showed she could have it.

But it’s more than a show biz kind of having “it.”

It’s the ability to articulate a message not necessarily of hope but one that makes citizens feel as if a candidate doesn’t just know the levers of power, isn’t just thirsting to hold the levers, or isn’t just adept at slicing and dicing an opponent while winking and nodding as if that’s not what’s really going on.

It’s the ability via force of personality or personal charisma to communicate a feeling that if the given candidate gets to the levers of power, power could be used differently to the benefit of a larger number of people.

But if I were forced to give a gut check on whether the initial promise can reach the White House in the next five months, I would be obliged to paraphrase the slogan that drove the past six months of campaigning. There are legitimate fears, serious anxieties, important doubts. But after watching him closely for the past year, one cannot but be drawn to an obvious conclusion: Yes he can.

And maybe he won’t.

But, even if that’s the outcome, history will already have been made — and perhaps by running Obama can help edge the political culture a tad away from the Baby Boomers’ never ending confrontational War of the 1960s to where it belongs — focused on the 21st century and getting an increasingly large number of Americans to work together in a new era where unity and consensus aren’t seen as the sign of a wuss or as dirty words.