Tuesday morning (GMT) and it isn’t over until the big one warbles.

Despite the polls, there are still a lot of unknowns — I’m not going to do a Donald Rumsfeld here, but I could. Apart from the so-called Bradley Effect, which may have lost some of its force, there’s also what I call, The Last Minute Panic Syndrome, which occurs when voters enter the polling station and think, “What do we know about this man? Can we trust that he’ll be up to it in these dangerous times?”

Don’t underestimate the latter — Bill Clinton (self-serving as ever) suggested that Obama is aware of it himself and obsessively phones every expert he can lay his hands on.

To declare an interest: before the primaries, I predicted here that John McCain would win. That was because I couldn’t see anyone better out there at the time.

It’s different now, of course. Barack Obama is definitely the quantum leap candidate, suggesting millennial change, at the very least in appearances and attitudes. If he isn’t elected, it will seem like a postponement of the inevitable, and, to many, an opportunity lost. There could be violence on the streets if it’s close.

My reservations about him are that he has unnervingly small experience, especially at this time of economic meltdown and other military dangers facing all of us. The world today is every bit as unstable as it was in 1914, 1930 and 1939. In comparison, 9/11 seems like a minor local incident — and look how Bush mishandled that.

Obama’s voting record in the Senate suggests he’s closer to Gordon Brown politically than any comparable American. Believe me, that is not a good sign. He may have a much stronger intellect that “W,” but in the present crisis conditions, any intellect is like an ice cube in a volcano.

But it has to be one or the other, McCain or Obama. Everyone else has been eliminated. The Veeps are all but forgotten in this moment of decision — even the gutsy Sarah Palin.

I’m not going to resile from my earlier prediction of McCain, although I know it could seem ridiculous by morning. The Mac may be back, but does he have the key to the croft?

If Obama does win, I predict he will bitterly disappoint his fervent evangelists who believe the world will change the moment he takes the oath. The appearance of the world may change, but the fundamentals will remain.

The next decade will be more like the 1930s than the 1980s. Obama himself may conclude in retrospect that he was unlucky to win when he did.

The conundrum though is, could he have reached the White House at any other time?

John Evans