Those Were The Days by Jamie Kirkpatrick

The date was July 27, 2004 and a relatively unknown but highly charismatic black man named Barack Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois, was delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention at The Fleet Center in Boston. Suddenly, like Rip Van Winkle, I was awake and alert after a long, long sleep. Maybe it was his fresh face or his energetic prose or his hopeful message, but whatever it was, I was starstruck. I had to meet him to see if he was real.

Back then, I worked in an independent school in the suburbs of Washington. Washington is all about connections and sure enough, the father of one of my students had worked with Senator Obama on his Boston speech. “Do you think I could meet him?” I asked. A couple of weeks later, we (student, father, and me) were on our way downtown to meet Senator Obama.

We spent about 45 minutes together. Mr. Obama was genuine; he listened; he asked meaningful questions. In some elemental but unscripted way, he forged an easy human connection. When we posed for a photo, I asked him if he thought he might ever run for President; he assured me he only wanted to serve the people of Illinois. Looking back, I don’t think he was being disingenuous; I just don’t think he was there yet in his own mind. When I returned to school later that afternoon, I told my colleagues I had just met the man who would be the next President of the United States. They either laughed out loud or said, “Obama? Who’s he?”

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, some of it calm, some of it roiling. I don’t think Mr. Obama has been a perfect President: he scolded Wall Street but left it largely unscathed; his use of drones defined a new, dangerous, and opaque type of warfare; police and community relations deteriorated drastically with often deadly results on both sides But history can be a temperate judge and despite Mr. Obama’s perceived failings, I still believe it will judge him favorably as much for his humility, decency, and grace as for his progressive domestic and international accomplishments: unprecedented job creation, healthy markets, the Affordable Care Act, the Marriage Equality Act, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Paris Agreement, and the Iranian Nuclear Deal, to name but a few. That he was our first President of color is culturally important; that he was a devoted husband, loving father, and empowering presence in the lives of so many previously marginalized citizens is a human legacy that will, in the end, more than stand the tests of time.

In his Farewell Address on January 10, Mr. Obama spoke fervently about the state of our democracy: “Understand, democracy does not require uniformity. Our founders quarreled and compromised, and expected us to do the same. But they knew that democracy requires a basic sense of solidarity – the idea that for all our outward differences, we are all in this together; that we rise or fall as one.”

My favorite images of Mr. Obama came in the unstaged and unguarded moments of his Presidency: playing peekaboo with a child on the floor of the Oval Office; holding hands with his wife; laughing along with his daughters; sipping a beer or hanging out at a diner with his late-in-life “brother,” Joe Biden. They are the images of a remarkably unselfconscious man who innately understood, appreciated, and practiced the genuine human interconnectedness that is the firm foundation of our political union, the truth that—in fact—we really do “rise or fall as one.”

Thank you, Mr. President.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with homes in Chestertown and Bethesda. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. “A Place to Stand,” a book of his photographs, was published by the Chester River Press in 2015. He is currently working on a collection of stories called “Musing Right Along.”