Sydney - There's an Obama blend at Campos Coffee in the hip Sydney suburb of Newtown, and on Wednesday, proprietor Will Young and his baristas were serving little else.

"The boss is a big fan of Barack Obama," Young said over the hiss of Italian machines that kick out 800 cups a day. "There's no McCain blend here."

And there were precious few Senator John McCain supporters at Sydney University's Manning Bar, where a sell-out crowd of 1,200 not only watched but appeared on CNN coverage of the US presidential election won by Senator Obama.

"We weren't expecting the size of this victory," said US expatriate Jesse Dart. "It was pretty much all over before we got to the West Coast."

The biggest cheer went up before the voting pattern in the US West Coast came in. The clincher was when two of McCain's aides had conceded there were "no paths to victory" for the former Vietnam War prisoner.

Organizers of Australia's biggest election bash - the event drew almost three times more people than they expected - had good reason to register no surprise when Democrats seemed to outnumber Republicans 10-to-1.

Last week, 72 per cent of respondents to a survey by Sydney-based political pollster UMR Research said they wanted Obama to become the next president. The poll of 
1,000 people found 9 per cent favoured McCain.

Michael Fullilove, a research fellow at Sydney's Lowy Institute, had cautionary words for those knocking back celebratory drinks at Manning Bar.

"Nobody is saying America is going to turn around on a dime and become like a Scandinavian country with a welfare state," he said.

But he did see "a real shift in international perceptions towards the United States, a different kind of foreign policy strategy on the use of force, on multilateralism" and said he believed an Obama administration would "move closer to an international deal on climate change after the macabre dance of denial and delay from the Bush administration."

Simon Jackman, an Australian who teaches politics at Stanford University in California, was also sounding a warning that the change Obama has promised would be more glacial than instantaneous because of the gigantic US budget deficit.

"There will be tremendous rhetoric and tremendous push for change," he said, "but it's going to be very very difficult for this ambitious agenda."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, rather than focusing on the agenda, stuck to the symbolism of the first black American voted into the White House.

"Forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King had a dream of an America where men and women would be judged not on the colour of their skin but on the content of their character," Rudd said. "Today, what America has done is turn that dream into a reality. The world looks to America for global leadership on the great global challenges of the 21st century." (dpa)