election day

There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good." Belief in the common good is the sole basis for hope. Without belief, there is nothing to be done. Such is the avowedly improbable basis for Obama's entire push for the presidency...

At the core of The Audacity of Hope is someone who lives at a distance, someone distanced from himself and from others and craving a bond, a commitment to bind him together with other Americans and to bind Americans together. There is a true horror vacui in Obama, a terror of loneliness and nothingness...

Obama wants to believe in the common good as a way of providing a fullness to experience that avoids the slide into nihilism. But sometimes I don't know if he knows what belief is and what it would be to hold such a belief. The persistent presence of the Mother's dilemma - the sense of loneliness, doubt, and abandonment - seems palpable and ineliminable. We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realization that nothing will change.

- Simon Critchley