Well, I held off my formal endorsement because I didn’t want to be accused of attempting to influence a foreign election, but you might as well know I was pulling for Obama.

And you also might as well know that the reason I’ve been gone for a week (and the reason you’ll be waiting a few more days to read my promised chapter III of the whole annoying-to-childless-people mediation on kids and happiness) is because my daughter Irene was born last Friday morning. Halloween baby! Instant goth cred, no?

In any event, those two dominating events are the subject of an essay I wrote on election day for Eye Weekly. In the nature of these things, we had to cut it by more than half its length to fit it in the paper. So for anyone interested in the director’s cut — or uncut — here’s the whole thing as I wrote it. (The short version: I’m really happy this week.)

On Tuesday, November 4, 2008, the day of the American presidential election, I feel — I am overwhelmed by — hope.

I literally, physically feel it radiating from my all-too-human breast, where they say it figuratively springs eternal. No matter how loudly the constant cynical hum of my consciousness attempts to settle me down with doubts and reservations, to temper my expectations, the tingling spreads from my heart to my belly, and my knees tremble and my tear ducts almost kind of sort of feel like they’re filling, and I get lightheaded and want to jump up and down like I’m back in a South Riverdale schoolyard.

It’s not blind optimism. My eyes are wide open and I expect a fair share of frustration and disappointment to come in due time. But today is a perfect day, this moment such a definitive turning of the page, so full of promise and beauty and unexpected goodness and pure potential that I cannot restrain the giddiness and pride and absolute joy, and I do not want to. Go ahead and laugh at all this unadulterated purple sappiness. I’m laughing myself. But it’s all true.

Between the time I wrote that last sentence and the time I’m writing this one, I went into the bedroom to check on my four-day-old daughter, Irene. She weighs seven pounds and came easier than expected — just three hours of labour that even her mother describes as “ridiculously easy” — and probably bears some of the blame (or credit) for putting me in such a sentimental state of mind. Full of the sleep-deprived pride common to new parents, my outlook is a fuzzy glow dominated by her tiny body and huge presence. Her head is perfectly round, with fine, barely visible blond hair. Like every newborn, she is fragile and innocent — breathtaking qualities even if they are fetishized to the point of nausea by Christianists — and has nothing yet but a squeaky cry and limitless potential. People become parents every day — and in fact I first became a parent two and a half years ago when my son Colum was born — and yet something about the first days of my daughter’s life make me feel like this moment is unreal, this joy undeserved and too good to be true. So I go into the bedroom and check on her and, sure enough, she’s still there, sleeping peacefully beside her mother. It’s a perfect day.

And between the time I’m writing this and the time you’re reading it, Barack Obama will be elected president of the United States. That too, seems unreal and too good to be true. Stack up the odds: he’s black and under 50 years old and his father was an immigrant and he lived part of his childhood in Indonesia and he’s not just intelligent but gives speeches that seem to assume his audience is intelligent too. All that and his middle name is Hussein and his last name rhymes with Osama. The American people who have just elected this man are far more deserving of my respect than the American people the buzzing cynical part of me — the part I call my brain — thought I knew, those American people who elected George W. Bush twice, the ones I had grown to fear and mistrust.

Four years ago, when Obama was giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention on the television in my living room, I called my wife Rebecca in from the kitchen and said (as everyone apparently did), “Come see this! I’m watching the first black president of the Unites States!” Hope stirred in me then, but I did not even begin to think that the task of turning that state senator into this president could be accomplished in four years. He was too young and the US was too racist, and he’d need to fill up his resume with compromise and cashable favours and then empty his rhetoric of anything approaching feeling or humanity or poetry or good sense, so as not to offend the imbeciles.

But Obama himself based his campaign on a gamble that disregarded the reservations of the conventional wisdom. He bet that after two generations of the culture war and the mendacious, base politics of the wedge, and then two terms of fear-mongering and criminal foreign policy and the trashing of the constitution and the selling off of the American Dream to robber baron dice players in the finance sector, the United States would be ready to leave childish things behind and let a grown-up run things. And it turned out he was right and everyone else was wrong. New daughter or no, that’s making me giddy too.

Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and, here in Canada, Pierre Trudeau are remembered as great leaders at least as much for what they represented personally as for what they accomplished. The right man (or woman — say Margaret Thatcher or Cory Aquino) comes along at the right moment and history is made by the force of personality as much as by the enactment of policy.

Considered that way, Barack Obama is a transformative symbol for the Unites States, in what his election says to the country itself and to what it says to the outside world. As racist as the United States may be, with its legacy of slavery and segregation, it has just elected a black man — a biracial man, in fact — president of the United States. As much as the divisions of the Vietnam era may haunt Americans still, they have just elected a man too young to be on either side of that great cultural divide. He is not a Bush or a Clinton, and in that fact alone he represents the turning of a page (it has been 28 years since the executive branch of the US government has not contained a member of those two families). He is a citizen of the world, educated as a child abroad, the son by birth of a Kenyan immigrant and by upbringing of a single mother. He’s a man who has mentioned gay rights frequently, unprompted, and often in front of hostile audiences. He is a scholar and a constitutional law professor and a writer of books and a speaker of magical, arena-lifting speeches. If the president of the United States is a public personification of the American people, then everyone in the world can be glad about the choice they have just made.

Obama calls himself a “hopemonger,” and in its implied opposition to the pervasive fearmongering of recent years, that self-definition alone should stir the expectations of the outside world. There was a moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when the world rallied to the side of the US — when a French daily newspaper carried the headline “We are all Americans” and most of us in Canada and around the world felt it to be a bit true, sharing the pain and shock of our neighbours in the world’s largest superpower and sharing their resolve that the people dealing in the mass execution of innocents and the spread of terror would not win.

But then the US government under George W. Bush became — or at least showed themselves to be — exactly what they claimed to oppose. It has been the Americans who have wielded arbitrary violence on the global stage, and threatened more as a tool of intimidation. It has been the Americans who have instilled terror in their own population with the beating of the drums of war and the manipulation of a colour-coded terror-alert scale. It had been the Americans under Bush and Cheney who have disregarded concepts such as freedom and human rights in torturing suspects and implementing invasive espionage programs at home and abroad. It has been the president and vice-president who have attempted to claim unprecedented dictatorial powers even while preaching “democracy” with missiles.

Barack Obama, a constitutional law professor, has opposed these abuses and disposed of the politics of fear when it comes to foreign affairs. He has preached diplomacy with
opponents and an end to the war in Iraq. He proposes, reasonably, to actually fight the terrorists who attacked and plan to attack the United States rather than fighting useless wars of ideology. He proposes to respect the constitution of the United States, one of the most perfect and inspiring political documents ever written, one more perfect than the country it governs has ever been. The country grows, as Obama puts it, “more perfect” when it honours its own founding documents, and more horrifying for those of us camped next to volcanic Mount USA when it strays from the principles laid out in them.

For those of us, especially those of us outside its borders, who have come to equate American patriotism with an idiotically mindless and violent xenophobia, the most astonishing thing about Obama’s campaign has been how much of it is based on patriotism. Obama’s big gamble has been to bet that the American people would, given the chance, attempt to live up to the words of its founders, to the proposition that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with fundamental rights.

From his “Yes, we can change” speech (which achieved internet immortality through the YouTube magic of Will.I.am) through his unprecedented movement of volunteers and legions of donors, he has displayed an optimistic faith in the goodness and reason of the American people. Taking an image of America as a shining beacon of light mythologized in Hollywood gloss to imperial effect by Ronald Reagan and cynically manipulated in the cheap and destructive maneuverings of Bush mastermind Karl Rove, Obama based his campaign on the unlikely proposition that those oft-repeated slogans were true.

In response to ridiculous attacks on the racial opinions of his pastor, he gave one of the most sophisticated and nuanced and true speeches on race in American history. In response to the Rove-ian kitchen-sink attacks of the Republican smear machine, he displayed an unflappable calm. He based his entire campaign on mobilizing an army of volunteers, turning out millions of first-time voters, generating unprecedented sums of money from donations of $10 and $20 and $100. And he did it all while refusing to villainize his opponents, always careful to attempt to explain his understanding of their opinions.

The only really shocking thing about all of it is that it has worked. And suddenly, at least on this perfect day, American patriotism doesn’t look so scary, and equally suddenly, it looks like it may be at least a little bit justified. For a Canadian, this is dizzying stuff, too good to be true. But then look up and, sure enough, he’s still there. Barack Obama is president of the United States.

Shortly after my son was born in 2006, I said to a friend of mine that I just hoped I wouldn’t screw him up. And she said, “Of course you’ll screw him up a bit, that’s what parents do.” And while I still hope I won’t screw either of my children up too badly, I know at some points, in some ways, I’ll let them down, and I fully expect them to do the same to me. In the relationship between parents and children, frustration and disappointment are as much a part of the natural course of things as pride and love. But the knowledge that heartache and fights inevitably lie ahead to some degree or another does nothing to dim the boundless hope and joy I feel tonight holding my newborn daughter to my chest trying to rock her to sleep.

In a moment I didn’t at the time see as related, an activist at a party some months ago asked me what I expected of Barack Obama. “I expect him to let me down,” I said, “that’s what presidents of the United States do.” And today as much as ever, for all that tears well up in my eyes at what President Obama means to his country and to the world, I expect his presidency to be a series of disappointments, as political realities — and the fact that he is human — get in the way of the image he has helped billions around the world craft in our heads. But that knowledge dims not one bit the glow of this moment, takes nothing from the magnificence of what he has already achieved and diminishes not at all the certainty that something fundamental in the United States has changed for the better. The long international nightmare is over. Reason has replaced dogma, compassion has replaced greed, persuasion has replaced intimidation. Where there was fear, there is now hope. And that’s a world to which I’m excited to introduce my daughter.

As I said, it’s a perfect day.