I got up at the crack of dawn yesterday to see if my man would win. I’ve been following Barack Obama’s fortunes for five years now, ever since the time I read a piece in The New Yorker about how a mixed-race upstart from nowhere had taken the high road in politics and won the race to represent Illinois in the Senate. I was living in New York at the time and Obama’s charmed political career seemed the one ray of light in an otherwise bleak political landscape.

Bush had led America into the catastrophic occupation of Iraq using a series of justificatory fictions that America’s newspapers and television news channels had enthusiastically ratified as gospel truth. The New Yorker and The New York Times, liberal papers both, had joined the war-mongering chorus led by Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets. So to read about a young black politician who, given the opportunity to smear his Republican rival for the Senate with sexual scandal, had been principled enough to refuse was remarkable enough; to know that he had had the intelligence and nerve to oppose the war on Iraq made me wonder if he was too good to be true.

It turned out that he was real enough. By the time he made his famous speech at the Democratic national convention that chose the ill-fated Johns (Kerry and Edward) for the 2004 Democratic ticket, I had begun to feel proprietorial about Obama, almost as if I had invented him. The more I read about him, the more he seemed like a mythical creature constituted out of a politically correct wish-list. Here was a Christian whose father had been a lapsed Kenyan Muslim, whose middle name was Hussein, who had had a white American mother, an Indonesian step-father and who had grown up in places as distant from the American mainland as Hawaii and Indonesia, and people were talking him up as a plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States of America!

He was as different from the incumbent, George W., as it was possible to be. They had both been to Ivy League schools, but the resemblance ended there. Bush barely managed a ‘C’; Obama finished his law degree at Harvard magna cum laude. He was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in more than a hundred years and here he was, some fifteen years later, bidding to be elected the first black president of the US in more than two hundred years. If he does get the Democratic nomination and if he does become president, that story about George Bush starting at the sound of his name around the time Obama became a senator because Bush had never heard of him before and, to his Texan ear, it sounded like Osama, will become legend. Obama vs Osama: if the Americans want to re-script the ‘War on Terror’ so they don’t continue looking like crusading villains, they could do worse than to elect Barack Hussein.

Obama really is a liberal fantasy, embodied, but he’s an American liberal fantasy. Huddled on a sofa on a freezing winter morning (the absence of central heating a constant reminder that this was Delhi, not Brooklyn), I felt vaguely embarrassed that I was so exercised by a distant election. Even allowing for the fact that America wasn’t just any foreign country and granting that after eight deranging years of Bush, a sane foreigner was likely to be more than usually invested in who replaced him at the helm, I couldn’t help thinking that tumbling out of bed at dawn betokened an unseemly interest in the affairs of another country.

Fortunately, I know that I’m not alone in being hypnotized by the saga of Barack Hussein Obama. The world’s press would have covered the American elections in the normal course, but the kind of fevered interest that I read in newspapers online borders on the obsessive and it isn’t hard to see that Obama is the reason. This isn’t to diminish Hillary Clinton, or the significance of a woman running for America’s highest office, but merely to recognize that if you’re trying to measure improbability in the context of the American presidency, race trumps gender. It’s possible that the reason I believe this is because I’m not white and male, but it’s unlikely. When I read white women commentators in conservative newspapers moved to eloquence by the prospect of Obama’s candidacy, I know that there’s something special happening.

Barack Obama has captured our imaginations for two reasons: one, his origins make him the opposite of inbred and insular. Maria Shriver, Kennedy heir and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife put it best when she endorsed him for the Democratic nomination. She said, “If Barack Obama was a state, he would be California...” and what she meant was that Obama’s hybrid origins mirrored the plurality and diversity of a state that had been constituted by continuous immigration. In increasingly multi-racial Western countries like the US, the need to move beyond the embarrassment of a near-exclusively white political class is widely acknowledged.

Obama is the only African-American member of the US Senate. There have only ever been five black senators in the history of the US. The historical wound of slavery, the standing reproach of a black underclass in the richest and most powerful country in the world, prompts even conservative commentators to acknowledge the promise of transcendence that Obama’s candidacy holds out.

The fact that his mother was white, that his blackness derives from an African (and not an African-American) father, that his political message and stump speech is resolutely inclusive, that his political manner is instinctively non-confrontational, makes Barack Obama seem like a painless route to a post-racial politics. Some black commentators and leaders have argued that Obama isn’t black enough, that his popularity amongst white folk represents not their willingness to confront America’s racist past but a tokenist way of looking past it. Paul Krugman, The New York Times’s most liberal columnist, sees Obama’s willingness to reach out to conservative America as a sign of political capitulation and the main reason for his popularity amongst independent, right-leaning voters.

Sitting on my sofa in Delhi, I had no real insight into how Americans of different colours and sexes saw Obama. All I knew was that I’d be happy to see a tale like this unfold in India. It’s unlikely to happen (not least because India is a parliamentary democracy and therefore doesn’t stage nationwide elections for a single post), but think how rousing it would be to see an Indian equivalent of Obama, someone as far from the ‘mainstream’, as mixed in his (or her) origins, with no inherited political patronage and no readymade party machine at his disposal, make a real, credible run for political office. Yes, he would have to make his peace with the interests that fund political campaigns, he would have to tack to the centre to create a political majority and it’s entirely possible that in the end of the process, the qualities that made him interesting and original might have been ironed out. But there’s always the possibility that something would remain. And because of that possibility, in a distant, second-hand, disenfranchized way, shivering on my sofa, I stared at the television and rooted for that fabled beast, this latter-day gryphon, Barack Hussein Obama.