In His Moment, Many Feel Echoes Of Their Own Stories: Washington Post
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 11:42AM Quoted via Washington Post, essay David Maraniss:
In taking the oath of office as the first African American president in the nation's nearly 233 years, one man reached a singular achievement. But at four minutes after noon yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama was inevitably transformed -- no matter what happens during his administration -- from an individual, a politician, to an icon and a symbol. Here was history at its most sweeping and yet intimate.
An essential theme of his presidential campaign was that his candidacy was less about him than it was about the coming together of the people of the United States of America, as Obama ritually called it in his rolling cadence. We are the change we have been waiting for, he would proclaim, repeating the mantra so often that he left himself open to sardonic mocking. Yet that idea, more than anything he said or did, became the dominant sensibility of an extraordinary day. more
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