A Thinly Veiled Satire of the Obama Era
Like so many others, I first watched him speak on the night of the 2004 Democratic convention, the year John Kerry became the nominee. He was still a state senator then, his face unlined, his head full of dark-brown hair. He humbly told the audience that his presence there was “pretty unlikely.” His Kenyan father had grown up herding goats; his paternal grandfather cooked for a British soldier. In a Baptist cadence, he quoted from the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words are stirring on their own, but when a certain kind of orator gets hold of them, the effect can feel like thunder, or the Spirit. The country had tumbled into a new century after a contested election and the start of a war in Iraq. Barack Obama spun a convincing vision of the nation as “one people,” in which our ethnic, religious, and ideological differences mattered little. When I think about what Obama meant to me at the time, my eyes pool with water. I was fresh out of college, taken by the force …
