After momentous week, Obama's presidency is reborn
This came very close to being the worst week of Barack Obama’s presidency, and, effectively, the last: a possible repudiation from both Congress and the Supreme Court, from his own party, from a country struggling with the same racial tensions he’s approached with a caution that’s often come across more like muted fear.
He would have been a failed president. He would have been a failed promise.
Instead, Obama finished the week in Charleston singing, really singing, and returned to a White House lit up like a rainbow that people who wanted to celebrate just felt drawn to. Hours after the partying stopped, they stayed late into the night, just sitting and staring at the building and thinking about how much had just changed.
What Obama first represented as a half-white, half-black man of a new generation, with the middle name Hussein and all the rest, seemed to have actually arrived in America — that guy America voted for in 2008 seemed to suddenly (and to a lot of his supporters, finally) show up. So did the country they voted for.
And Obama’s voice broke through in a way that it hasn’t, maybe, since the 2004 keynote address that introduced him to America. A week that started with the media obsessing over one charged word he said ended with the country glued to his whole 25-minute eulogy in South Carolina on how the country is a whole lot more racist but also a whole lot more hopeful than it likes to admit, reverberating and replaying on the news, on iPhones and on YouTube all through the night and weekend.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/barack-obama-momentous-week-president-reborn-social-issues-119503.html#ixzz3eQmqIbtF
= new reply since forum marked as read
