A year ago I saw a financial pundit on morning television pointing at a graph of the stock exchange index and saying that not only had it been going up for years but it would keep on going up forever. That everyone should be investing in stocks and shares, it was a sure thing.
A year ago John Howard was prime minister, and there was no certainty that his 11 year rule wouldn't stretch on forever.
A year ago George Bush seemed typical of the kinds of presidents America was going to have forever.
A year ago the kind of winner-take-all and the devil-take-the-hindmost economic and military policies pushed by hate radio shock jocks, global remuneration scale chief executives, and hard faced back room Liberal operatives and politicians, seemed destined to last forever or 1000 years at least.
And then John Howard lost, and a pale flicker of light on the eastern horizon suggested that, contrary to all expectations, the sun might yet return. But it was only a flicker, as the new leader of the country seemed to be just another John Howard wearing a younger man's clothes.
Rudd sought the approval of Murdoch and other big business leaders for his policies, and it was clearly no longer the case that the Labor Party asked "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free".
The stock market was still heading up, and a completely unregulated economy with a huge and growing gap between rich and poor still seemed the highest achievement of humanity after 5000 years of civilisation.
That is certainly what Rupert Murdoch will have told our Kevin. "Leave it alone Kevin" he will have said, "make one move towards socialism and there will be a horse's head on your pillow."
And now, suddenly, faster than you can say "collapse of the Berlin Wall" comes "collapse of the New York Wall Street". And not long afterwards, John McCain, heir apparent to Bush, no longer just looked like yesterday's hero, but the day before's, or even the day before that. And suddenly we have Barack Obama who, whatever else he is, is certainly not George Bush in a younger man's clothes. And that flicker I saw on the horizon is now a definite gleam in my eye.
Obama is also not just Rudd with a Chicago accent. I don't think he is bringing radical change to America or the world, but his big advantage over Bush is his intelligence, his education, his knowledge of a world outside America, and his willingness to listen and learn.
Nor does he strike me as the kind of man, with his real knowledge of the poor, who will go to war with his own people to take their money and redistribute it to the rich, and go to war with other countries in order to take their oil and redistribute it to American SUV drivers.
And his very election says that the people of America are sick of living in a country run purely for the benefit of the friends of Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney. That it is possible to tax the rich a little more than the poor without civilisation ending. That it is possible to regulate big business for the benefit of the whole community, not just the men with the golden parachutes. And those are no small things in America, the land where 99 per cent of huddled masses better stay huddled for the good of the one per cent, and like it, or the terrorists will come and kill them.
Look, it isn't a done deal. The comparisons between Obama and Kennedy, Roosevelt and Lincoln, may be overblown, but I think Mr Obama might do some good things. And perhaps, just perhaps, Kevin Rudd might take heart from the American election, and might start to recognise his roots in the party of Curtin and Chifley and Whitlam. Might start to move on child care and aged care and education and health in ways that don't reflect the demands of big business, might unhuddle a few of our own masses.
Oh, there will be screams in the corporate media, but the media now has as much credibility on political and economic matters as the financial expert pointing at the ever rising stock market.