He's My President

Go back to those hopey-changy days and you'll hear Barack Obama warn us that he's not perfect and that he will make mistakes. His administration has been a specific and serious disappointment to me here and there, and expressions of disappointments--like that song that interrupted him at a San Francisco fundraising dinner--are valid.  But just as a president might be worn down by the day to day disappointments, so can those of us viewing that President.  Sometimes we need a reminder.

I got mine when I caught just a bit of a PBS program that I believe was basically about Air Force One.  It involved several Presidents, but it showed part of a speech President Obama was making.  For a moment it focused on a face in the crowd--a black boy of maybe 10 years old.  President Obama was coming to the end of his speech, repeating words he's said many times before--about how if people can change a room they can change a neighborhood (or however it goes) until he ends by saying they can change the world.  The boy was rapt, and by the time President Obama got to saying this, he was saying it right along with him.  He knew it, in every sense, by heart.

When I was young--though not quite that young--I had a President I believed in, whose words I could recite.  Now I have another.  I believe in President Obama as I believed in President Kennedy.  I could offer good reasons, but it was this fact I wanted to hold--that once again in my life, and possibly for the last time, I had a President again.

And now I want to savor it for as long as it lasts.  It's no longer fashionable to feel this about President Obama.  But this feeling is informed by reality.  By objective criteria, his presidency is historic and successful in historic proportion.  He is withstanding--and working within--a wave of barely acknowledged racism, that threatens us all.  The media hardly knows how to behave, and nobody quite knows how to respond.  But we are all affected by it.

The black man in the blue suit amidst a sea of white sofas--that says a lot.

So I am going back to celebrating this man as President, and his family in the White House, and how beyond the daily news and the Beltway drama he affects us.  There are going to be photos reflecting all of that on this blog I hope quite regularly.