"4 more years"

The first thing to do is to congratulate Barack Obama for his success. Let's face it, with the prospect of a dangerous right wing hawk such as Romney in the wings, we needed him to win.

If Romney had won, we would see an inevitable march towards war in Iran, and an Israeli State that would have increasingly felt able to bomb whomever it wanted. Romney would have taken us back to the right wing fundamentalism of the Bush era, and that would have had terrible Global consequences.

Now Obama is promising us that the 'best is yet to come' and we have reason to have scepticism about what that means. I remember the hope of the early days of his first victory; a vague hope of the elimination of nuclear weapons; the promise to close Guantanamo torture centre; an end to the 'mistakes' of the war on terror; a fairer economic climate favouring the poorer rather than the richer; greater emphasis on the environment.

On all of these counts, Obama failed to deliver. He could blame the Republican dominated Senate for some of it, but there was also a clear a failure of passion, and a collusion with the banking and military establishment that cannot be understated.

It had not taken long for my optimism on his election to die down. In Obama's first 100 days, more people were killed by his foreign policy decisions, than in the last 100 days of Bush's presidency. The excessive use of 'drone' technology did not live up to 'the hope for peace' that he talked about.

We expect more from Barack Obama, not out of naivety, but out of necessity. The world needs a different economic approach that genuinely tackles and transforms the evils of capitalism. The world needs all of us working for non-violence. The world needs us to turn from the environmentally destructive path that we are on.

As the most powerful nation on earth,The US needs to leads the way in all of those battles, and Barack Obama is going to have to do much more than just deliver a great victory speech.