Slate does a great current event summary through the format of Obama’s Facebook feed. Pretty funny and informative, check out the social networking action here.
Tag: obama
Obama’s People
In preparation for the inauguration, the New York Times will publish 52 portrait shots of Barack Obama’s top ‘people’ taken by Nadav Kander and Kathy Ryan.
The shots can be seen online with audio from the photographers here.
After viewing the photos, I was most blown away by the three gentlemen below. Jon Favreau (Speechwriting Director), Eugene Kang (Special Assistant to the President), and Reggie Love (Personal Aide to the President, probably the President’s goto power forward) are the three youngest members of Obama’s cadre at 27, 24, and 26 respectively. It’s nuts that these guys are just a couple years older than me, and yet they already have their hands in one of the biggest moments of recent history and some really sweet gigs.
Obama
I have a feeling things won’t be the same anymore.
And from what I can hear and see from my room, Philadelphia feels the same way. From speaking to my parents and friends, it is clear that we are in the middle of something monumental.
Exaltation, relief, pride, joy…I don’t know enough words to characterize how I feel or explain why I am trembling.
Barack and Black Politics
“Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” is a very interesting article from the New York Times Magazine recommended to me by Dong. The article is a look into the impact that Obama has and will have on black politics and the line he walks that separates two generations of black political thinking. If elected, Obama is expected to be both a leader and a black politician roles that seem at times mutually exclusive especially when thinking about maintaining influence. Obama as President would be a racial milestone, but the transition he must provide to a new generation of black politics will be a delicate task that he must pioneer.
For those who won’t read the article, the following is a powerful anecdote that I wanted to share. Speaking about a photograph that hangs in James Clyburn’s office:
Above his couch hangs a black-and-white photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in Charleston, with the boyish Clyburn and a group of other men standing behind him onstage.
When I visited Clyburn recently, he told me that the photo was taken in 1967, nine months before King’s assassination, when rumors of violence were swirling, and somewhere on the side of the room a photographer’s floodlight had just come crashing down unexpectedly. At the moment the photo was taken,
everyone pictured has reflexively jerked their heads in the direction of the sound, with the notable exception of King himself, who remains in profile, staring straight ahead at his audience.Clyburn prizes that photo. It tells the story, he says, of a man who knew his fate but who, quite literally, refused to flinch.