Obama just keeps stepping forward

[frazzled]

1. Your friend's friend has an interesting and perceptive take on our country

As for Obama: that reasonable equanimity is what made me first pay attention to him.

I moved to Illinois in 2004, just a month before the election in which he would become senator of that state. (Gosh, is 2004 that long ago, or so little time ago?) A few months after he'd taken office, we happened to be invited out to dinner by a colleague of my husband's. As it also happened, I was seated next to the colleague's husband, who, as it further happened, was a law professor at the University of Chicago. So the talk naturally turned to his colleague, Barack Obama. After some comments around the table, I mentioned that I'd recently watched a hearing (on Iraq I believe), in which the new senator was speaking. I said I thought he'd been very eloquent and incisive in his questioning, if somewhat polite, but that I hoped after he'd been broken in a bit as junior senator, he'd be able to be more outspoken (or something like that). I recall getting a serious stare in return, with the response: "That's not who he is." Essentially, I was told that the eloquent, polite, thoughtful Obama I'd seen was precisely who he had been and was likely to be in the future, not some firebrand I'd thought up in my head.

So my expectations for Obama, when he ran for president four years later, were very different than the expectations of many here. I'd come to admire his equanimity and, most of all, his consistency over time.

Yes, it may not look like it what with all the craziness from the right, but we are inching forward, with no flash or dash, but consistently, one little step at a time.