As befits an historic occasion, newspapers took a long view of Barack Obama’s election, both back to the days of slavery and forward to the years ahead in which the president-elect will have to enact his campaign message of change.

Several drew parallels with the 1960 election of John F Kennedy.

“Not since JFK will America have had as charismatic and inspirational a leader,” said The Independent. “Charisma and soaring oratory do not guarantee good government. But America is demoralised, exhausted and broke. It needs to turn the page on its recent past. And for that, it needs words, as well as deeds, to inspire it.”

The Financial Times sounded a sobering note. “History will not forget this extraordinary moment in America’s story. But politics is much less forgiving,” noted Edward Luce.

“Faced with a mountain of domestic and global problems that would have taxed the leadership skills of America’s greatest presidents, Mr Obama will have to act swiftly to justify the faith his country’s voters have placed in him.

“Added to this,” the FT said, “America’s president-elect will come to office amid unusually high expectations at a time when government’s ability to meet them will prove increasingly difficult as the downturn starts to bite. Given these Herculean challenges and the tendency of politics to cut leaders quickly down to size, Mr Obama may well find that his greatest accomplishment for many years to come is already behind him.”

The Daily Telegraph noted how Obama has pledged a staged withdrawal from Iraq over 16 months and said he would be unlikely to go back on that promise now. The next problem would be Iran.

“While the future for Iraq may appear to be clear-cut, the focus will now shift back to Iran,” it said. “Mr Obama has displayed much less certainty about how to handle its aggression and the country’s quest for a nuclear weapon.

“The Iranian leadership, emboldened by the US shrinking back in Iraq, can conclude it has an opportunity to take advantage of President Obama’s rebranding of American foreign policy.”

The Times was in no doubt of the symbolic importance of the election of the son of a Kenyan goatherd to the most powerful position in the world.

“From today, a black child born in America will look on his nation with greater pride because he will feel that the highest office in the land is open to him,” it said. “The American nation will replenish the confidence that it has lately lost. In the eyes of the world, the slate will be clean and the pretext, always spurious, for anti-Americanism has been removed.

“On his very first day, and without doing a thing, Barack Obama has brought America together and brought America closer to the world.”

The Times noted how the Obama campaign ended with a rally in Manassas, Virginia, close to the site of the first major battle of the civil war that split America in two over the issue of slavery. “Entire American lives passed in servitude and no single moment can truly expiate the shame,” it said. “But it would be a hard heart that said no progress has been made today.”

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle looked forward four years.

“The election of 2008 feels, in many ways, like the resumption of a progressive project that was mislaid in the convulsions of the 1960s,” he wrote. “Obama surely knows better than anyone that, if he is to turn this victory into an enduring reshaping of American politics, then the really important election is now the one in 2012, for which the work starts now.”

Several papers also used the moment to take a last look at George W, Bush’s presidency, which will end at the formal handover of power in January. The left-leaning Daily Mirror said ”the long nightmare of the Bush era is drawing to a close, which is a cause for real celebration.”

But The Times called him an acute and thoughtful politician whose great mistake had been to squander the goodwill toward America generated by the 9/11 attacks.

“In his eight years in office, George W. Bush has taken some of the confidence from America,” it said. “There would be no need for such audacious proclamtions of hope in a country that already felt good about itself.”