The election, the economy (the money, the waste): America is home to the bifurcated attention span, so if you read every two paragraphs simultaneously from here on you will understand how I have survived here since September.

In the ruckus about Sarah Palin and what she didn’t know about the Bush Doctrine (‘absolutely clueless’, according to Friedman’s fellow columnist Bob Herbert), and which was Tina Fey and which was the governor of Alaska, I went to a series of election group-therapy sessions at the Princeton University Centre for Human Values, just up the road. The nights were genial watch-the-debate and then agonise-over-the-result get-togethers, with expert polling input and spokespeople who would be at home in The West Wing. The Centre, which numbers Peter Singer among its notables, is not, as you might guess, a Republican strong-hold, but the Democrat commentators, because so neurotic about the result, displaced their Toby Zieglerish anxieties onto Barack Obama’s performance. After the first debate, which ‘if he didn’t lose he definitely didn’t win’, the prevailing judgement was that he should have gone in harder, played more cannily to the prejudices of, say, West Virginian voters. That Delphic demeanour of his just wouldn’t cut it with blue-collar voters in the Appalachians.

I wondered at the time whether we had been watching the same debate. Where I saw an assured, tactically shrewd, constitutionally savvy and articulate man, (antipodean naïf, I should have learned more from a decade of tricksy campaigns in my own country), others saw missed opportunities. And said so, in emphatic American voices. (I was reminded of what Don Watson writes so insightfully, in American Journeys, about the double-edged sword of American rhetorical confidence.) The hard data, the polling and inside stats all pointed to an Obama victory. Nonetheless, we were warned that the precedents of the past two elections didn’t allow for complacency, or anything resembling it. ‘Getting out the vote’, as Americans put it, is always an imponderable. And there were other concerns – malfunctioning machines, voter misinformation, skulduggery – to keep small ‘d’ democrats nervous and eternally vigilant.

After the second debate, the Human Values crowd were happier. By the third, vice-presidential debate, even with a by-now prepped Palin, they were modestly confident. The disaster-prone Biden didn’t mess up, and Palin, for all her sass, was glib and meandering when confronted with specific policy questions. Besides, by now only her most stalwart champions (such as the conservative Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who, for a time, had done a very good impersonation of a man with Palin’s favour fluttering from his breast pocket) were still sanguine at the prospect of a Palin presidency.

And there was The Economy, now swollen to allegorical proportions. McCain had not managed to ride the leviathan. Obama didn’t pretend to, but in the final debate he offered more consistent hope than did McCain. He had, after all, gone into the race with a monopoly on the term. And to flesh out virtue ethics he offered policy solutions, admittedly sketchy, but more consistent than McCain’s. He talked about industry, education, taxes, taxes again, and the Bush – and McCain – record in effective but not hectic detail. He debunked, politely, the ‘maverick’ claims of his opponent. His views about America’s disastrous health care carried more credence than McCain’s. The economist Paul Krugman (Princeton academic and New York Times columnist) writes frequently about the deficiencies of health-care provision in the United States. Now, with a Nobel Prize to his credit, his diagnosis has had more impact. Krugman does not believe that Obama’s plan, which preserves some of the field for the private insurance companies, goes far enough. But he scores it higher than McCain’s. The Nobel came at just the right time for the Obama campaign. So did The Economy, and one can allow that without being a gallows humorist. Both McCain and Obama had the opportunity to turn the financial chaos to their advantage. Obama did. McCain did not.

The state of American health care works in tandem with the scandal of American housing foreclosures to give voters concrete instances – and a language – through which to express a nationwide unease about ‘where the country is headed’. Worrying about whether your father can afford a hip operation, or where you are going to live now that the bank has taken the keys to your home, becomes a surrogate for the conversation about race that it is almost impossible to have in America. Latino men have hip trouble. Black families have lost their homes, too. If you are in work, your employer may cover your health costs. But so many – black, white, Latino, Native American – face unemployment. The dignity of so many has been compromised. All in it together.

Dignity, the nation’s integrity, its reputation – I have had countless conversations about this bedrock of American identity over the past months. In San Francisco in October, a taxi driver kept telling me over and over that he was outraged at the suggestion that Obama was ‘palling around’ with terrorists, and a close friend of ex-Weatherman William Ayers. Why? Not because the cabbie was a reflex and unreconstructed hippie who would vote as matter of course for a black man. No, his argument was profoundly conservative. The accusations, he believed, attacked the institutions that defined America. ‘He’s a United States senator, for God’s sake. You just don’t say that about a United States senator. Do you know how many checks he would have to go through to become a United States senator? And he’s from Harvard Law School, for Christ’s sake. He’s a constitutional lawyer. Do they hate people who are educated or something?’

Yes, we were in California, and yes he was chewing on broccoli, undressed, from a bag on his lap. But his arguments and his passion could have come from any east-coast constitutional stickler, and in their invocation of the founding principles of the Republic, his words would have fit any conscientious conservative.

At the Centre for Human Values, we waited until after McCain’s gracious concession speech before break-ing out the champagne. And even then the celebrations were muted. Something so extraordinary had happened that it was hard to find words, and even more difficult to sound trumpets of jubilation. Jesse Jackson’s tears, unstaunched as he stood as just one American among many in the crowd at Chicago’s Grant Park, told all the history and complexity and irony and marvel of the moment.

One of the aspects of Don Watson’s complex sympathy for America that I value most is his knack of doing justice to the regenerative and self-reflexive capacities of country. He understands the paradox that is America. He acknowledges the home-grown energies devoted to unpick-ing the paradox, aspects of which are cemented into the founding architecture. He would no doubt understand how important it is that Obama should be a practised constitutional lawyer (who understands the separation of powers). The world may criticise, or sneer, or castigate, or even collaborate, but it will be the Americans themselves who will repair their own institutions and be their own fiercest critics.

An incidental but not insignificant pleasure of living here is the ease of access to so much extraordinary and forensically detailed media. Of course, there is an avalanche of bread-and-circuses rubbish and, yes, the hopes of an Edward R. Murrow – that television would serve the ideals of the Republic – have not been realised. But the self-corrective imperative remains strong. One hopes, with Americans themselves, that it is strong enough to meet the expectations of the whole world, in Iceland as in Iran or Sudan or the Middle East or Australia’s Kimberly region or the industrial sectors of China. Because so much depends on American’s adroit and wise reading of the changing tides.

That Obama is adroit we have evidence. That he is a symbol and a pivot in American and racial history we know. Whether the individual man can meet the expectations of his countrymen and the world we will have to wait and see.

The expectations are extraordinary. Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have not had so much asked of them. A few days back, a newspaper article speculated whether this svelte man might be able to single-handedly change the baggy pants and underwear-exposed fashion of American youth (we don’t say black youth, but it’s implied). In a train on Saturday, I watched a young black lad hunch into his grey hoodie and fossick in the thigh-low pockets of his pants. When he drew his hands out, he pulled down his sleeves to cover them. Then he turned his face away and stared out at the graffiti that pocks the trackside of Philadelphia. Will he stand up straight and look the world in the eyes because Obama is president? I don’t know. Maybe.

The complete correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Words in Air, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) came out during the election campaign. I am sure Barack Obama hasn’t had time to read it. And you might ask why one would at this time. ‘A poet’s poet’ they called Bishop, not always kindly. Lowell, well – so troubled, so much a mid twentieth-century American. So Boston. What could he say to us now? But the letters the poets exchanged after John F. Kennedy’s assassination fix the dark beginning of this chapter in American history. From Brazil, where she lived, Bishop reports ‘the streets full of people, the newsstands mobbed, and many people crying openly. The grief here has been genuine.’ Lowell, just recovered from one of the manic bouts that dogged him lifelong, replies, ‘Kennedy’s murder was a terrible trauma for us all … I found myself weeping through the first afternoon, then three days of television uninterrupted by advertising till the grand, almost unbearable funeral. I guess it had some-thing to do with my crack-up. The country went through a moment of terrible and passionate chaos, with everyone talking wildly, and deeply fearful and suspicious.’

The moment has a different cast now. There have been tears, but tears that presage an end, and a new beginning, not a pitch back into chaos. Perhaps. What is certain is that both outpourings, forty-five years apart – of grief then and cautious joy now – evince a deep longing that the heart of the country be restored to itself.