EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’VE BEEN CHEATED?
Shot:
Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
— “Obama’s Gift,” as divined by current GE spokesman Ezra Klein, then age 23, in the American Prospect, January 4th, 2008.
— The London Daily Mail, yesterday.
You’re only a semi-retired lame duck POTUS counting down the days of your last year of office once — why bother with dignity?
(Classical reference in headline.)