It has been difficult to write of the election of Barack Obama in any measured or even tone, since we know it to have been an event of the epochal and extraordinary kind in countless ways. And counting, as we know of old, is a problem in American elections - notwithstanding the stubborn sureness of 365 to 173 in this newest of tallies. If a global economic crisis gifted this election to the Democratic party, it is perhaps then unsurprising that Obama’s own account of victory should be so repeatedly expressed in the terms of a peculiarly confused numeracy. ‘Out of many we are one’, he asseverates in Grant Park, addressing a numberless sea of faces. ‘Our stories are singular, but our destinies are shared’, he articulates finely to an unimaginably immense global community. The very idea of counting itself is rendered difficult in a rhetorical landscape of seemingly reconcilable ones and manys, singularities and unicities, but a confused economics of ontology is nothing less than we might expect in a time of global financial crisis since the markets tell us that every transaction we authorise and each signature we inscribe binds us into one intercalated system of circulation. In the mire of personal debt and individual overdrafts, the rhetoric of a solid unicity might sound infinitely electable to our ears - solitary human beings are easily won by promises of community, but the integrity of that complete integer, one, in this particular economic moment offers a potent antidote to those vast negative sums and spiraling depreciations with which we are becoming increasingly familiar.
And yet if this election has asserted the easy co-existence of our conditions of mutual singularity and communality (‘one’ and ‘many’, ‘shared’ and ‘singular’), it remains difficult to discern exactly what that could mean. Easier to compute in that historic moment, perhaps, is Obama’s owning to ‘a debt beyond measure’, an acknowledgement of gratitude that is ironically put in these economically difficult times. And this idea of a value ‘beyond measure’ might be a useful formula for this new political calculus insofar as ‘beyond measure’ might signal not immensity nor immeasurability but something more like the singular incommensurability of all things, the indivisible remainders or irreducible fractions that cannot be resolved into an integer, but whose parts share in common their separate incompletenesses.
Obama himself is, naturally enough, the image of this strange new innumeracy. The elected representative of the one drawn from the many, he is simultaneously the most famous man in the world and determinedly inscrutable. In Grant Park, as his young family leave him to the stage, he seems startlingly lonely (not just alone, but lonely), although it is clear that not one upturned face in that crowd could not know his name. In that instant, he is terrifyingly vulnerable too. At moments, the cameras catch the light reflected from the doubled sheets of protective glass, invisibly strengthened to shield a body, one body, now visibly violable. There is courage involved in so willingly taking to a stage, the willing acceptance of one’s singularity and the vulnerability of that singularity in which you stand for everything: the one drawn for and from the many. And although there is courage in willingly shouldering that responsibility, there is more courage, perhaps, in allowing for such willfulness - the kind of courage that Michelle Obama seems to know. Colin Powell’s wife, fearful for his life, was able to deter her husband from presidential ambition - an alarming fact rendered all the more pointed by Colin Powell’s own late endorsement of Obama. There is courage in accepting one’s singularity, but there is heroism in accepting the singularity of others, the heroism of that which is perhaps given unwillingly, unbidden and unknowingly, even, in the case of Obama’s children.
In Dreams from my Father, the plurally singular emerges as Obama’s chosen quantity. He steadily narrativises that combination of unique singularity and promiscuous identification that renders him such an electable candidate. But there is an odd moment in the story when visiting his Kenyan family for the first time, he finds himself mistaken for a ghost. In Kenya he is struck by the novelty of being in a country in which his name is, for the first time, not strange but familiar, recognizable even. Walking in town with his half-sister he is surprised when an older man seemingly recognizes him, happily shakes his hand, notes how tall he is grown, enquires after his mother, and his brother. Obama’s confusion at this encounter compels from his half-sister the explanation that ‘No, I was a different brother, Barack, who had grown up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away’. Obama notes here, in passing, how peculiar and discomforting it is to be mistaken for a ghost, how strange it is to resemble a sibling you never knew. This strange non-encounter with the ghostly brother, the other mixed-race son born of his father’s second American wife and killed in a car accident, whose life might otherwise have been his, is momentarily unsettling and recounted only in passing. But it seems an important moment in a story that is by its nature the narrative of Obama’s exceptional singularity. The ghostly brother with whom he is briefly confused, signals the unexpected exchangeability of being one - one that is not really the only one but might be many others. The encounter is ironic too, perhaps, for his global audience for whom this new President-Elect Obama is unique, an unmistakable sort of man, whose dual claims to peculiar exceptionality (one) and ordinary representativeness (many) has won him an election.
It is, perhaps, safer to be exchangeable than unique if you are to be the one elected representative of the many - there is, after all, so much invested in the security of your dangerously singular being. And yet, presidency isn’t really something that can allow for such exchangeability. Obama’s presidency in particular has already set its benchmark at the unprecedented. And in this brief interregnum in which he waits in the wings, a President-Elect, he remains, momentarily, an unknown quantity, globally recognisable and not yet recognisable either as the President he is still to become. The gift of this yet unformed presidency to come could be a commitment to the unprecedented and a willingness to work with the terms of the new political calculus with which it was won: in other words, an engagement with the singular from which the whole is formed that doesn’t succumb to sacrifice or subjection, and an acknowledgment of the incommensurability of differing claims for justice that seeks neither to negate nor neglect any one of the many for any other. The challenge of this presidency might be to deal justly with those insistent remainders of the last presidency; in other words, those irreducibly difficult parts not easily summed up nor subtracted from any global political equation. The recent escalation of violence in Gaza only continues to demand the equitable dealing of justice in a land that continues to be neither sharable nor divisible. The question for this next presidency is how to deal justice equitably in a situation where the casualties suffered by one side so outnumbers that of the other, where the force of one so resolutely overpowers that of the other, but each of whose claims to one land are incommensurable and urgent. Even beginning to deal with that fairly would make Obama truly unique, (the one), but as things stand now, it’s not something we should count on.
