By The Free Press | Created at 2025-01-21 00:01:58 | Updated at 2025-01-21 03:28:19
3 hours ago
On January 20, 2009, a few journalists crowded into my apartment in New York, and we had brunch and cocktails, and two or three people smoked cigarettes, and we watched Barack Obama become the 44th president.
It felt like a moment of great possibility. There was the obvious historical significance—Obama being sworn in in the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and on the same Bible Lincoln had been sworn in on, in 1861. The end of an odyssey. The overcoming of our original sin.
But it was also—and it’s embarrassing to concede as much now—a moment of unbelievable cool, which was what Barack Obama was, at least in early 2009. He was from a big city, and he smoked, and he’d done cocaine, and he was black, and his whole demeanor was chill. He was no-drama Obama.
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