Living in America one grows inured to apocalyptic rhetoric. The world is predicted (and believed) to be ending with a regularity that is almost reassuring. Everything had changed in 2005, too. In August of that year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killed more than 1800 people, and caused property damage estimated at US$81 billion. And it presaged the unravelling of the George W. Bush’s presidency.

Barack Obama was never going to be caught out or judged lacking as Bush was. Obama’s presidency has been, of necessity, an exercise in calculated – and natural – contrast, devoted in part to bringing an end to the wars Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld began, and repairing the economic damage wrought by years of war spending, tax cuts, and permissive regulation. Obama has learned, if he didn’t know before, how America expects its leader to act in times of crisis. The public images are carefully orchestrated of course, and hugs come easy, but few Americans would now question Obama’s sincerity or his determination to fit his administration’s action to his public shows of concern. And if they did question it after Sandy, there was New Jersey’s Governor and Republican presidential aspirant-in-waiting, the irrepressible Chris Christie, to tell them what Republicans didn’t want to hear: that President Obama was wonderful and all American should be grateful. Christie certainly was grateful. The New Jersey coastline had been pulverised, and the state’s financial position was precarious even before the onslaught. His people needed federal aid and so did he. So there, on national television, endlessly replayed, we saw the hug. That some Republicans flayed Christie (a sizeable undertaking itself) for even touching Obama says much about the racism that still lies like poisoned groundwater beneath American politics.

Damage wrought to the New Jersey Pier by Hurricane Sandy (photograph by Mark C. Olsen)

The Republican Party, reeling from an electoral defeat they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, see coming, invoked Hurricane Sandy as the act of God that saved Obama’s skin. Books will be written about the mass delusion that rendered Republicans blind to what independent polling was telling them. Other books will be written about America’s – indeed the world’s – reluctance to confront the significance and consequences of changes in our weather patterns. But Obama’s victory was no accident and no act of God. The mystery is why so many people didn’t see it coming. Not just in America, either, where so many didn’t want to see it. Here in Australia, where Obama is well regarded (this president’s popularity abroad is one of the factors that counts most against him in the United States), many of the pundits, even the public, were tipping Romney or sitting on the fence (‘too close to call’). I was back in Melbourne, briefly, in October, and most of my conversations, predictably, were about the US elections. Friends called me Pollyanna, some to my face, so often I grew nervous myself. But read Nate Silver’s blog in the New York Times, I would counter, or check out the nerdy stats published by Sam Wang in the Princeton Electoral Consortium. Sam was spot on last time. I kept providing the link to his site.

In January 2013the New York Review of Books carried an article on Nate Silver headlined ‘How He Got It Right’. It was as though Silver had proved a mathematical theorem of surpassing difficulty. Maybe both men needed Bill Clinton to distil their stats and math (Obama’s preferred term) into ‘arithmetic’, as he did to such effect during his Democratic Convention speech. Everyone does arithmetic in grade school. But algorithms underpinned by predictive nous? Sounds élitist. In America mystery has more appeal than statistical method.

But it was method – a front-footed campaign team equipped with voter stats and social media savvy – together with grassroots national popularity (Obama was seen as being ‘in touch with the American people’ in ways the plutocratic, tin-eared Romney could never be), and a democratic stirring in reaction to Republican efforts to suppress the vote that gave Obama his victory.

Hurricane Sandy accelerated the post-election shift in mood – the world looks, and is different, after a catastrophe; people reorder their priorities. And after 7 November some previously ignored facts became popular currency: America now recognises that its demographic has changed. Hispanic Americans can no longer be ignored, insulted, or persuaded to ‘self-deport’ (Romney’s term). And there are simply too many of them now to shunt sideways by electoral redistricting.

President Obama visits the American Red Cross Digital Command Center following Hurricane Sandy

There was another reversal in expectation. The business-as-usual approach to campaign funding didn’t work this time. Big money, unleashed in unprecedented and unaccountable billions by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United (the landmark 2010 ruling that, by invoking the First Amendment right to free speech, freed corporations to make unlimited election campaign donations) not only did not determine the election result, it scarcely influenced it, at least at the presidential level. The lack of return on investment has not been lost on the corporations and players like the Koch brothers. But elsewhere, money did talk. In state and local elections, big dollars bolstered Republican interests. There are now more states controlled at every level by successful Republicans: governors, senators, representatives. The political division will become even starker.

Money corrupts all levels of American politics, and neither party is innocent. The gap between rich and poor is now wider than it has ever been in American recorded history. But when so many live in poverty, and are seen to be living in poverty, the misuse of money becomes an open scandal. Not even residual Puritan convictions about personal responsibility and independence can suppress the yen for change.

Citizens United can be overturned. One of the most significant aspects of Obama’s victory is that he now has an opportunity to alter the political tenor of the Supreme Court. Confirmation of presidential nominees is never straightforward, and judges, bless them, are rarely predictable, but a new court, with judges installed under Obama’s administration, is unlikely to rest with the status quo on some of America’s most controversial rulings.

There is also a clear acknowledgment now that the American electoral system, devolved as it is to state and local regulators, is vulnerable and manipulable. Florida and hanging chads were not enough to prompt wholesale reform, but the 2012 queues (people waited in line for up to seven hours in some neighbourhoods, notably black and Hispanic ones), the shortening of early voting periods, and the arbitrary imposition of requirements (photo ID in areas where many people often don’t possess even a driving license) caused so much outrage that Obama ventured this (impromptu?) aside in his victory speech: ‘By the way, we have to fix that.’

Some Americans were doing their best to fix it even before the elections. I learned of some sample efforts from my friend and local pastor, Dr Alison Boden, Dean of the Princeton University Chapel. Alison’s husband, also a clergyman, has a parish in Philadelphia, and one of his pastoral projects in the months leading up to the election was to help parishioners and other locals obtain photo IDs. I could applaud his democratic fervour but was appalled at the expense of time and effort. Philadelphia, like New Jersey’s Trenton, has thousands of people who live in conditions few Australians have experienced or would tolerate. How much better to serve them? Or so I thought. But then I remembered the way the East Timorese travelled, sometimes for days, to stand in line and vote in their first election after gaining independence. One becomes complacent about democracy in Australia. And even though Americans – sometimes up to fifty per cent of them – don’t vote, the right to do so is manifestly prized. Slavery, its abolition, and the vote are all intertwined. Universal suffrage came at a terrible price in America, and it still betokens freedom in ways that I only slowly come to comprehend.

‘Money corrupts all levels of American politics, and neither party is innocent’

None of which alters the fact that America’s electoral system is broken and requires radical and immediate repair. Australia offers a viable model. But Australia, for all our whinging, is not so constitutionally tethered to states’ rights, so our system, central, efficient, and independent, is unlikely to be adopted. I won’t even broach the idea of compulsory voting.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was released before I left America in December. I saw it, repeatedly, in the local bughouse (called, heaven knows why, the Princeton Garden Theatre). The audience there is keen, and engagingly mixed. Students chomp popcorn next to grizzled academics who rustle their Toblerone foil. We get in for $7 – a small price to pay for such a primer on American history and imperatives. Each time I came away from the film I was haunted by a sense of urgency not native to me. So much had to be done during Lincoln’s tragically truncated presidency. So much was done. And in the name of a kind of collective aspiration, a national resolve. You don’t have to be a citizen to understand the importance and the consequences of Lincoln’s vision or his ambition for human equality and a common purpose.

Barack Obama’s presidency is uniquely linked to that legacy. In the grey hairs and the newly incised lines on his face you get some inkling of what that must mean, day by day, in each victory and through the many defeats that America’s intransigent, dysfunctional politics inflict on a Commander in Chief. His country prides itself on its individual freedoms. Live free or die is a national mantra as well as New Hampshire’s state motto and its license-plate exhortation (it replaced ‘scenic’). Many do die, as we have seen, and more still will die while the debate over gun control is played out. America is nigh on ungovernable. It always has been. Yet it expects its president to bind all together, to be the strongman, the cowboy and the fireside chatterer, the statesman, the comforter of children, and the consoler of parents whose children have been massacred, as they were at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School on 14 December.

It is paradoxical, and confounding, this coupling of an assertion of freedom with a demand for unified purpose. It is unreasonable to expect any man or woman to straddle such irreconcilables and do it with clarion conviction. But America does expect, and those expectations have sometimes been met. Scott Fitzgerald’s green light still beckons the American imagination. Lincoln still commands his Washington memorial, his words carved into the wall behind him, and I find it impossible to stand there, read, and not be stirred to my bones.

Can the will to act as a people, as Lincoln’s Gettysburg ‘we’ who ‘here highly resolve’, be reignited in atomised America? I don’t know. I wish so. I have some inchoate observations to persuade me that my wish is more than whistling. It’s not evidence, but perhaps it points in that direction. Here is some of it, translated into facts to stub one’s toes on, to make one walk in a different direction.

Hurricane Sandy exposed the rents – many of them literal – in America’s fabric. It made a national issue of what had been state or local infrastructural problems, neglected because so many of the states are in financial strife and some are plain broke.

It will be harder, now, to argue convincingly for the repeal of Obamacare when the inadequacy of American health provision has been so exposed.

It will be more problematic to insist on the private and profit-making operation of utilities when so many Americans, rich as well as poor, have been left stranded by inadequate water, power, transport, and emergency services.

The National Rifle Association will not have carte blanche in quite the way it did, before Newtown, to lobby for the right to carry guns into bars, courts, and schools, or to construe combat assault weapons as the arms necessary for self-defence.

Obama does not need to campaign again, and so is now at liberty to take the risks that might have undone his presidency in its first term. We have not yet seen him at full stretch. Perhaps we will.

Twenty years ago, in New York, I enjoyed a spirited conversation about Australian public broadcasting with an American who had spent years living here. He could not have been more enthusiastic about the ABC. It was a detailed, chapter-and-verse enthusiasm, not just the routine courtesy Americans offer to a visitor. We traded specific memories of favourite programs, even down to theme music and news fanfares. We named broadcasters we admired, dished ones we didn’t. There was an exceptional degree of fit – except for cricket. He didn’t get it – not surprising, I guess, for an intellectual living on New York’s Upper West Side and teaching at Columbia University. It was a memorable evening.

But what stays with me most vividly is what happened at the end. We agreed that independent public broadcasting was essential for democracy, for cultural coherence, and integral to the common weal. What we could not agree on was how to fund it. Americans, he insisted, would never tolerate a compulsory license fee or a dedicated tax. And, when it came down to it, neither would he. The very idea violated some fundamental principle of liberty. I didn’t get it.

I had just endured my first American public broadcasting fundraiser, a quarterly phenomenon that obliges distinguished journalists to suspend regular programming – along with their dignity – and turn carnival barker, enticing donors with promises of PBS mugs, tote bags, or David Attenborough DVDs. At the time I thought it demeaning. I still do, though over the years I have developed a bemused fondness for its large-hearted neighbourliness. But the puzzle doesn’t go away. How can the richest country the world has ever known require its public servants to go begging four times a year? I still don’t get it.

But I am not American, and that is not a boast. Don Watson, as fascinated by the place as I am, writes (in American Journeys, 2008) that ‘You come to see that, to Americans, freedom means something that we incurable collectivists do not quite understand; and they know freedom in ways that we do not. Freedom is the country’s sacred state.’

A fantasy, a chimera, this freedom? Perhaps. Incompatible with national coherence and a shared destiny? Maybe. But I shall watch the next four years with clear eyes, and hope to learn.