“How Barack Obama Rewrote the Book” - Poem

[BridgeTheGap]

“How Barack Obama Rewrote the Book”

Some princes are born in palaces.
Some are born in mangers.
But a few are born in the imagination,
out of scraps of history and hope. … We get the leaders we deserve.
And if we lift them up and then cut them off,
refuse to follow
unless they are taking us to Disneyland, then no president, however eloquent,
however historic his mandate
or piercing his sense of what needs to be done,
can take us where we refuse to go.
This did not all end on Election Day,
Obama said again and again
as he talked about the possibility of ordinary people
doing extraordinary things.
And so, we are merely at the end of the beginning.

Nancy Gibbs, Time magazine November 5, 2008, “How Barack Obama Rewrote the Book”