Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

Indivisible man: what the new president means to me.

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Early on November 5, the morning after the election, I lay in bed wondering to myself if we had really just elected a man named Barack Hussein Obama to be president of the United States. Would the country's forty-fourth chief executive actually be a "skinny black guy with a funny name," as he olden described himself during his two-year campaign? Maybe I had dreamed the whole thing. From my pillow I could see it was still dark outside; it seemed much too early to make any sense of this. I turned over and tried to fall back asleep.

But what if Obama had been elected? What if he had won by a commanding margin, the largest of any Democratic candidate in years? What if we had really gotten beyond the obvious differences and come together this one time? It seemed like something worth celebrating in a big way. I lay there for a moment with my eyes closed, letting myself be lulled by the idea of flying out to attend his inauguration (that is, of course, if he had won). I imagined trying to find a good spot to witness the swearing-in ceremony at the steps of the Capitol but the area being so crowded that I had to keep walking all the way to the other end of the National Mall toward the Reflecting Pool, where 45 years earlier Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his famous speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Not that I know D.C. very well: I've been there only a handful of times, the last being eleven years ago, when I still worked in...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!