In February 2007 in Springfield, Illinois, the same city where Abraham Lincoln had launched his political career, Barack Obama announced his run for the presidency. Temperatures were subzero outside the Old State Capitol and those around him wore thick scarves and gloves. Meanwhile, he exuded a benign, hatless warmth, impervious to the cold (I later read online that a heater had been placed under his podium).

In Lincoln’s hometown, Obama quoted the great man’s words, calling on “a house divided to stand together.”

I recently realized that, in my memory, I had mangled his words to “a house divided against himself cannot stand.” I must have preferred that version because that’s what it felt like he was saying to me: he wouldn’t be divided against himself. In becoming the embodiment of a mixed nation, he would transcend its divisions.

I was a shy eighteen-year-old confused about my identity, and Obama spoke to my desire for “a certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity.” My experience of politics had been the grinning managerialism of New Labour. After a decade of waiting for a “new era” to arrive, I wanted a superman: a comic book narrative of self-discovery that would compensate for my own self-ignorance.

Now here was a politician who not only looked different, but talked beautifully—and knowingly—of his mixed-race upbringing. Here was a story that was long and painful but seemed to bend implacably toward justice. As I slouched in my freezing university dorm room, watching him on my laptop, his voice booming through its tinny built-in speakers, maybe I did weep a little. I was living away from home for the first time listening to a man who, unlike me in most ways, had named a problem I’d felt my whole life: I was divided against myself. He invoked “a journey,” an “improbable quest,” “a future of endless possibility”—phrases which, in hindsight, sound like taglines for a bad fantasy film—that made my confusion seem epic and important. His speech over, he turned toward his wife Michelle, who was wearing a velvet bucket hat and looked happy. Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” was playing to the crowds.