With the amazing events of the last 10 days, David Remnick says the idea that President Obama “would play out his Presidency, after the political defeat of the midterm elections, as a professorial lame duck turns out to be without basis. And that gives a certain weight to his remarks in early 2014.”
Said Obama: “We’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. … But I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”
“It turns out that this was not, for Barack Obama, a rhetoric of resignation at all, but a kind of resolve.”
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