It started with hope
Highlights of Obama’s historic presidency Moving moments and amazing photos
On that freezing January day eight years ago, he stood before the gathered thousands and rose to the nation’s highest office.
He was a young man, a brilliant man, a man of unparalleled political gifts. He was self-evidently a good man, a doting husband of a strong a beautiful wife, a devoted father to two little girls.
He was a man who had risen to prominence and power in a nation torn apart by deep partisan rifts, offering himself as a uniter of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
And, lost on no one, America’s 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama, was a black man — or, more precisely, the Hawaii-born son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya.
For a nation whose original sin is forcing humans of darker skin color into brutal bondage by the millions, a nation still shadowed by racial discrimination and degradation, Obama’s blackness was epochal.
“This will be a milestone that so many suffered for, fought for, died for and voted for,” we wrote the day he swore the oath. “A mountain will be crossed.”
The mantra of the man carrying the flag across the mountain was hope. Though treated by some as little more than an electoral slogan, it was a prescription-strength balm for a country dispirited, racked with cynicism, sour to its stomach. Barack Obama became President Obama at a moment of near-perfect peril. America’s economy was bleeding 700,000 jobs a month, in danger of lapsing into a depression. Its financial system was in near-free-fall. A national industrial jewel, its automobile industry, was failing. Two long wars, one waged for all the right reasons, the other launched under false pretenses, still raged, and boots on the ground felt increasingly mired in quicksand.
And voters looked to him not only to be an emergency room surgeon who would stop the bleeding and stabilize the pulse, but as a master builder who, after years of too-small thinking and government by and for the special
interests, would accomplish important things for the greater good again.
America’s ambitions for Obama were rivaled only by Obama’s ambitions for himself, and for his administration. He would turn the page, he told us, on bitter generational squabbles. He would save livelihoods from economic collapse. He would save lives from the ravages of battle. He would knit together a frayed safety net by finally extending health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
He would lead the nation to lead the world to slay climate change.
He would restore America’s battered reputation around the globe.
He would, he implicitly hinted, help heal the country’s stillvisible racial scars.
And he would bring America together not through the magic of his charisma, but by leading a debate grounded in decency.
On that day, in words that crackled with optimism but were, typical for the man, sober and straightforward, he told us:
“Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life.
“It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness.
“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.”
He said, “Let us, each of us, now embrace with solemn duty and awesome joy what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.”
The grace of those words, the grandeur of the moment, and the gravity of the speaker were about to encounter the grit of guiding America through eight wrenching years of politics and history.