Few US leaders have captured the enthusiasm of the world as Barack Obama did on election night 2008.

From Paris to Beijing, Rio to Oslo, Johannesburg to Cairo, people gathered in bars, hovered in public squares and watched TV through the night, awaiting the November 4 results.

When it was clear that US voters had decisively sent Obama to the White House horns blared and tears flowed across the US. Cheers ricocheted worldwide. The townspeople of Obama, Japan, danced.

'Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place,' wrote South Africa's Nelson Mandela to the president- elect.

The relief was great that George W. Bush, one of America's most globally unpopular leaders, was leaving. So was the joy that the once-racially segregated nation had elected its first African American leader – 'a fairy tale,' said Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski.

Along with the fervor came a smothering flood of expectation that Obama would mediate all wars and conflicts, put a derailed world economy back on track, and make everyone happy by being the non-Bush.

Mandela, who as South Africa's first post-apartheid president in 1994 had his own challenge of meeting soaring expectations, called for Obama 'to combat the scourge of poverty and disease everywhere."

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the first Iranian president since the 1979 Islamic revolution to congratulate a US president on victory, seized on Obama's pledge to hold unconditional talks on his country's controversial nuclear program.

Lebanon's Shiite House speaker Nabih Berri wanted Obama to "start by resolving the Middle East crisis."

Europeans envisioned cooperation after eight icy Bush years, with climate change and dialogue with Iran at the top of the list.