1 “A skinny kid
with a funny name”
Watch it again.
He is unusually stilted at the beginning, as you might expect of a debutant on
the autocue and the national stage. But soon he finds his rhythm, those
crescendos alternating with electric pauses, ecclesiastical notes chiming with
his scholarly charisma in a musical voice. Grippingly, he recounts the story of
his life, in his telling a parable of unity in diversity—a moral he was still
pushing 12 hard, disillusioning years later. “We are Americans first,” he urged
in the Rose Garden on the day after Donald Trump was elected.
In fact, by the
standards Barack Obama subsequently set—in a presidency defined by its
speeches, and perhaps to be best remembered for them—his turn at the Democratic
convention in 2004 was mundane. But his ascent will still be dated from the
moment he loped onto that stage in Boston, with the rangy gait that became as
familiar as his smile: an unknown politician from Illinois, soon to be the
country’s only African-American senator, before, in short order, becoming its
first black president. The paean he offered to America, a country that had
embraced him as “a skinny kid with a funny name”, was also a kind of dare; the
self-deprecation camouflaged a boast, since many in his audience saw the
obstacles he faced as clearly as he did. “I’m the African-American son of a
single mother,” Mr Obama reportedly told Binyamin Netanyahu when, years later,
Israel’s prime minister lectured him on the world’s hazards, “and I live here,
in this house. I live in the White House.”
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