President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama return to the White House in Washington on Friday. They were returning from Charleston, South Carolina, where President Obama eulogised and attend services for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was one of nine people shot to death at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last week.
Reuters/Washington
Barack Obama has reached the stage of his presidency where if he wants to break out in song publicly, as he did with “Amazing Grace” in a eulogy on Friday, then he’s going to do it.
With a year-and-a-half left in office, Obama is shedding some of his trademark “no drama” style for a looser approach, admitting that he feels more fearless and liberated.
It may also be in recognition that he has few big-ticket policy achievements left to enjoy in polarised Washington as the end of his two-term presidency approaches.
In a remarkable week for the president, a victory on Pacific Rim trade was snatched from the jaws of defeat on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The Supreme Court on Thursday validated his signature healthcare law, guaranteeing he would accomplish a central second-term goal, to protect the 2010 Affordable Care Act from being dismantled by Republicans.
The icing on the cake came on Friday with the high court’s decision to legalise same-sex marriage, a move Obama said was a “big step” toward equality for Americans.
After the court decision was announced, Obama took a Rose Garden victory lap.
“Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back,” he said.
“And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”
Some Obama confidants described a more liberated, even feistier president, willing to mix it up with a heckler inside the White House, as he did on Wednesday. Or willing to use a racial epithet, long abandoned by civil society, to describe black people in urging more racial unity.
Why the change in style? He has more experience now, the president said in a podcast interview last week with comedian Marc Maron.
“Part of that fearlessness is because you’ve screwed up enough times that it’s all happened. I’ve been through this, I’ve screwed up. I’ve been in the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls and I emerged and I lived. That’s such a liberating feeling,” he said.
Norman Eisen, a former White House counsel to Obama and former US ambassador to the Czech Republic, said the president “feels a little freer now ... to let his heart show publicly.”
Eisen has known Obama for almost three decades and maintains that the president’s “core is the same.” But on subjects he cares deeply about, including race, Eisen said Obama is displaying more of his emotions.
Obama’s speech on Friday in tribute to nine African- Americans killed by a white gunman in Charleston, South Carolina, was what the black community has wanted to hear from him for years.
This was not simply Obama as healer-in-chief, but a call to action from the president to end racial insensitivities.
