Though I often found myself cringing at the restrictions and downright perversities of the American political imagination that were inscribed on Obama as he groomed himself to become electable, I soon gave in. Like millions, I started to live in and with the spectacle of electoral politics American-style: the maps, the pundits, the polls. But I soon realized that this election and the Obama campaign in particular thrived outside of the spectacle, in the work of nearly a million dedicated volunteers in a campaign run on the model of community organizations. Field organizers for the Obama campaign often lived in the houses of local people in their assigned areas; they recruited volunteers from the local communities for the campaign, which sometimes helped to create new and otherwise unlikely friendships among local people, in lots of small towns in isolated and depressed rural areas. People talked—some in e-spaces like Facebook and myspace, and some in the houses and dorm rooms of volunteers—about the world and people’s places in it. Many explicitly called it a “movement,” and now that the election is over, many of the organizers and volunteers see a more active role for themselves to ensure that the issues and hopes that inspired them are not forgotten in the push to make Obama “govern from the center.”

On the news, they referred to this obliquely as Obama’s excellent “ground game” or “ground war,” but there was no engagement with the people on the ground that made this election happen. This election was not a media-generated spectacle, and for a generation of Americans raised in the image-dominant simulacrum of American life, this was its defining newness. Just as the experience of Grant Park on November 4 was not captured by the news coverage, the lived experience of the Obama campaign did not even make the news. You actually had to be there.

I realized at some point that the struggle to elect Barack Obama was much more than a political chess game, especially for the “Millennial” generation of Americans, those who came of voting age during the Bush years—my students, I can proudly say. And whatever the realpolitik of this phenomenon, whatever the limitations of the candidate and the process, the election of President Obama became a vindication of our individual and collective aspirations to do the good and the just, to reach across our divisions in hopeful moments of recognition and togetherness, aspirations that still survive—believe it or not—in the violent vortex of modern civilization, in the churning of the belly of even the American Empire. “I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper,” Obama often says at the conclusion of his speeches, and somehow America responded to this. Those of us who recall the cold discourse of the Reagan years and the accommodation to it in the Clinton years were taken aback. Obama speaks to people’s unarticulated desire for more caring, cooperation, goodwill and lives of consequence—and he speaks about these aspirations not only as private virtues but as public values. There is something of what Cornel West calls the “prophetic Christianity” of the Black Church in Obama’s occasional ability to reach into the soul of America—though he also sometimes seems more comfortable talking about tax law and policy.

I’ve been to downtown Chicago for various mass gatherings before, such as political protests and various parades and cultural events. On the night of November 4 the difference from all previous events was palpable. The mood at protests is one of anger, bitterness, judgment. The police are our enemies, and the people we pass on the streets are merely puppets in the hands of commercial interests. Separation, despair and indifference had cratered the emotional landscape of the city. But on November 4, the public was, simply put, happy. Yes, happy. Not an easy thing to be in Chicago’s public spaces, especially in November. The sight of strangers congregated in a spontaneous overflow of goodwill is not common in downtown Chicago. The first sight to greet me as I emerged from the dark stairwell of the subway and onto State Street was a traffic jam—only this night, people had their windows open and were shouting through them with glee. I caught the eye of one Latino in a car, who smiled giddily at me and waved.

There were street performers and street vendors everywhere, the entrepreneurial spirit of the street revived and rejuvenated with an event of significance, rather than the usual ball game. Everywhere vendors sold election posters and hand-drawn images of President Obama, some of them creative collages of Obama with the great founders of black emancipation, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman and others; several vendors sold T-shirts splashed with “Yes, We Did!” in bold letters, and this soon became a chant among the crowds. There were break-dancers and saxophone players and drummers. One man was dancing on a ledge with a bull-horn, shouting out the letters in Obama’s name, “O-B-A-M-A” and asking, “Who’s our president?” The crowd responded good-naturedly and joyfully, “Obama!” as they walked past him and his public display of happiness.

As we walked to the Jumbotron where we hoped to catch a glimpse of President-Elect Obama giving his election speech, I tried to soak in the sight of the diverse crowds, their delight and the tears I saw streaming down people’s faces. As we crossed Michigan Avenue, I saw a group of Sikh men and women. The men were wearing turbans and they had children with them. And even as I started to glance away from this group, I saw two tall black men approach the Sikh men, shake their hands, and hug them while the whole group erupted in laughter together.

President Obama appeared on the stage just as we approached the outer edge of Grant Park, and the crowd started running to get close enough to see him on the huge screen. Where we were standing, there were trees, with yellowing fall leaves rustling in the wind, and it is through these leaves that I caught occasional glimpses of the new president on the screen. His calm and serious voice was booming from gigantic speakers and bouncing off of surfaces, so it was hard to follow every word. And though we were thousands of feet away from the stage, the audience around me responded to his words, carrying on a conversation with Barack Obama as if he were speaking to each person personally, like a call-and-response across the spatial divide. When President Obama talked about the war, one man shot back a response, “That’s right! Bring them brothers home, B.” And when Obama mentioned the tragic loss of his grandmother the night before the election, several shouted out sympathetically, “Uh-huh. Don’t worry. She’s smiling down on you, brother!” And when he said that “the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals,” I joined the teary-eyed chorus around me singing, “That’s right!” and “That’s it!” One black man standing behind me muttered, “This brother could be a preacher, man!”

I realized that I had never been to a place or lived in a time when people loved a leader. I could see around me that people saw themselves in Barack Obama. Black Americans, whites, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans. The young and the old. Apparently, even people in other parts of the world were inspired and excited, and this might partly be attributed to the hegemonic power of American culture; but I’d like to think that it goes beyond this. President Obama has real roots in non-American and even non-Western societies; in Kenya, the home of his father; in Indonesia, the home of his step-father; in Hawaii, where his Midwestern, white grandparents raised him through his teen years. What I’ve read by Barack Obama—especially his moving memoir, Dreams from My Father—suggests to me that his experiences have given him the ability to see himself in unlikely others, and to temper his Americanness with an awareness that there are rich, thriving, teeming worlds outside of America.

A group of very young Indian women made their way through the crowd and were standing next to me. I remember looking at them and wondering what they were thinking and feeling, why they were so happy, and what they saw in this new president. I admit that I felt a bit surprised by their enthusiasm, and in the case of one woman, by the evident devotion she felt. Most young Indian people I’d known were either apolitical or conservative in a self-interested way. But then I remembered that I, too, was an Indian woman, and that there might be others who were surprised by my assumption of inclusion in this process. In that moment, we all felt included by this man, a child of an immigrant like we were; a man in search of roots and community like we were; someone who wanted to believe in the civilization he had joined as an outsider, like we had. It did not matter that this moment of belonging was—as all great moments are—ephemeral, that in our daily lives our exclusions and invisibilities would probably go on.

This moment of mutual recognition between President Obama and the American people probably will not last forever. Power corrupts, as Obama himself is acutely aware, and he has become the leader of the most powerful imperialist nation on the planet. One of my favorite articles in this election cycle comes from an unlikely source: David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist who had the sense to ask Senator Obama what he thought of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It turns out that Niebuhr is one of Obama’s favorite philosophers, as he was Martin Luther King Jr.’s. In answer to Brooks’ question about what he “takes away from Niebuhr,” Obama said:

This is not the place to go into the intricacies of Niebuhr’s philosophy, King’s critique of it, or even Brooks’ colossal misinterpretation of Obama’s words in the rest of his column. The next few years will give us plenty of opportunity to revisit Niebuhr’s understandings of power and the (im)possibilities for love, justice and community in our world—especially as we measure our expectations against the realities of the next few years. It’s clear that Obama understands the precarious balance between power and principle, and the great chasm between the promise of America and the American reality. Obama’s answer to Brooks also gives us some insight into the source of Obama’s humility—the most striking feature of his victory speech on November 4.

Although I could not hear every word of the President-Elect’s speech, and though I couldn’t scrutinize and analyze every twitch of his facial expressions as I’d been in the habit of doing during this campaign, I was struck, even in Grant Park that night, with his sober and sobering demeanor. He did not stride out onto the stage triumphantly. There was no victorious gleam in his eyes, no tone of accomplishment in his speech. It seemed almost like he was observing this moment, even as he delivered its substance. I felt slightly confused by this disconnect between the jubilation of the crowds around me, and—for lack of a better word—the non-jubilation of the man who had inspired all these people. Perhaps he was sobered by the daunting tasks ahead of him, humbled by the great and unrealistic hopes and expectations we have placed on him. Perhaps he was only too aware that he was destined to disappoint, as all leaders are who live to see it through. Or perhaps in his pragmatic American way, he wanted to make sure that the people’s celebrations and joy did not erupt into disorder in the middle of Grant Park on the night of his election.

I watched the people around me and took in the significance of this moment, and even though I couldn’t forget about what America had done to so much of the rest of the world and to so many of its own citizens, I felt proud of America at that moment, perhaps genuinely so for the first time in my life. I thought of another critic of America, the great James Baldwin, one of its “native sons” who had expatriated to Europe to escape the brutal injustices, the crass commercialism and the strangely ideological moralism of an America without morals. While in Europe, he wrote a very insightful essay, “Stranger in the Village,” in which he compares his experiences as a black man in a small Swiss village to the experience of being black in America. The whole essay is worth reading, but let me quote here the especially relevant conclusion:

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Written presciently at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the launch of the Civil Right’s Movement in the South which catapulted the prophetic visionary, Martin Luther King Jr., onto the world stage, Baldwin’s essay seems to speak even more presciently to us today. The world is truly no longer white. America does have a story to tell about how whites can face this fact. But in this global age it is worth remembering, too, that the world is not America, nor should it be.

Several important moments of transformation have come together in the election of President Obama: the collapse of the cynically duplicitous ideology and economics of neo-liberalism, the bursting of its speculative financial bubble, the trickling up of bankruptcy, the “trickling down” of despair, the near-total unraveling of the Republican Party, and the right-wing more generally. The coincidence of these related disintegrations is telling: in a moment when Americans felt like the world might collapse around them, they chose Obama’s way of diplomacy, dialogue, peace and “wealth-sharing,” rather than succumb to the darkness of anger, bitterness and scapegoating. As we saw in the election, the latter possibility was very real.

President Obama’s main job in this time of economic collapse will be to save capitalism, and in doing so to restore American supremacy. We have no illusions about that. And, now that we have elected President Obama, we will have to shift gears. We will have to hold him to his words. We will have to be his critics. I think President Obama would expect nothing less. He himself has noted that he will not be able to do certain things without pressure from below. A leader, after all, is only as good as the people he leads.

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Madhuri H. Deshmukh teaches writing and literature at Oakton Community College, near Chicago. She has a Ph.D. in African-American literature, and is currently doing research on the bhakti poet, Janabai. She has previously contributed to New Quest.