This is from Mr. Andersen's wonderful essay on Obama as published in the November 9, 2008 issue of New York magazine. If nothing else, please read the first four paragraphs:
When we were growing up, the future was the 21st century, and the future was going to astonish us.
And so it has, eight years in, and not just with whiz-bang gadgets. We were astonished by the attacks of September 11. By the administration’s bungling of the Iraq War. By Hurricane Katrina’s scale of destruction and the administration’s incompetent response. By the realization that global warming is possibly out of control. By the teetering of the global financial system.
Yet none of the 21st century’s OMFG events has been any more astonishing than what happened last week. Not just a Democratic president, but one elected with the third largest majority of any Democrat in the past one hundred years; not just a resoundingly victorious Democrat who lacks (for the first time since most voters were born) a southern accent, but who nevertheless won three southern states; not just a big-city northern Democrat whose name recognition was close to zero 1,500 days ago, but an eloquent Ivy League intellectual; and, of course, not just an unknown smooth-talking pointy-headed neoliberal with an exotic upbringing, but, yes, an African-American.
For those of us born since World War II, never in our adult lifetimes (as the next First Lady undoubtedly meant to say last winter) has any single event made us prouder of our country—and for those of us who live in this city, never have we felt more completely in sync with it. We’re all Dorothy, stunned at having just stepped out—tripped out, one might even say—from a half-wrecked black-and-white reality into a strange and glorious new Technicolor world.
Please may I have more...
