Best line about Obama’s visit to the White House yesterday:

“I can’t believe Obama is already sitting down with an unpopular, aggressive world leader without preconditions.”

Brains Are Back!

Michael Hirsh writes:

What Obama’s election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one’s enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

In the spring of 2004, Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Evanston, Illinois, told me a funny story about startling President Bush during a visit to the White House. She was wearing a big, blue “OBAMA” button. This was in the early days of Barack Obama’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Bush “jumped back, almost literally,” Schakowsky said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’”

– from the New Yorker

Obama did worse than Kerry among gay voters? What the hell?

[Update: I think Homer makes an excellent point. Very small sample size of gay voters, which might have led to inaccurate results.]

I woke up this morning and it hit me all over again: Barack Obama is the President-elect of the United States.

I can’t get over how wonderful it feels.

I keep having to remind myself that it’s not just the end of a campaign, but a new beginning of something else. We’ve just concluded a two-year epic saga, in which one of the main characters was Barack Obama. But it’s not like getting to the last page of a book, where you put it down and never think about it again. No — we’re at just the beginning! This has all been just prelude! It’s like we’ve just finished The Hobbit and we’re about to start reading The Lord of the Rings.

When I’ve hoped and thought about Barack Obama being president recently, it’s not just the Big Idea of it, but the little images that have come into my mind:

• President Obama giving the State of the Union every year, with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi standing behind him.
• President Obama walking across the White House Lawn to Marine One, then turning around to give a salute before ascending the steps of the helicopter.
• President Obama and the leader of another country sitting together in fancy chairs in the Oval Office, while photographers click away.
• TV reporters referring to him as “the President,” without even having to use his real name. “The President announced today…” or, “Norah O’Donnell, NBC News, with the President.”

Really, I feel like we’re at the beginning of a remake of The West Wing.

And I love this article about the new First Family.

Obama will make mistakes. He has difficult decisions ahead. Our country’s in the toilet. And day-to-day governance is messy, with its daily news cycles, the messy legislative process, wins and losses, Washington sniping, political roundtables on TV. Poetry gives way to prose. In the euphoria of his election and inauguration, Bill Clinton talked about changing the culture of Washington. So did George W. Bush. It never happened.

There will be times I disagree with President Obama, get annoyed at him, disappointed in him. There will be times when the public does as well.

But this is an extraordinary man. And if things are even a smidgen better than they’ve been for the last eight years, we’re in luck.

On Tuesday night, as Obama was speaking in Chicago, I turned to Matt and said, “We’ll finally have a president again who knows how to speak.”

That alone is reason to rejoice.

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran an article about the Lincoln Memorial and how the role of Abraham Lincoln in the American memory has changed over time. Next year is Lincoln’s bicentennial, and the Lincoln Memorial will be rededicated in the spring. The piece ends this way:

In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed—measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps—in the fourscore and seven years since 1922.

So President Obama will speak at the Lincoln Memorial next May. It will be stirring.

This was the part of Obama’s victory speech that made the tears start flowing from my eyes.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

Yes we can.

Among all the excitement, something might be lost: Obama won Florida.

To see Florida colored in blue on the electoral map — it’s so cathartic. It helps heal the wound that Democrats have felt for the last eight years.

He did it.

No words.

I can’t describe how great I feel.