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I have no doubt that affirming these narratives was the only way for a person of color, in the period Obama arrived on the national stage, to achieve leadership in this majority-white country. In the Clinton and Bush years, for someone like Obama to cast his or her life story in more radical terms …

Theories of history are always theories of the future, and Presidents’ theories of history often involve occult, oracular communications with the future. George W. Bush, as the disaster of his presidency wore on, became a desperate reader of biographies. When Bush said “history will judge,” history…

Time returns in the peroration, but in a different way: as an expression, Lincoln-like, of humility.

These orations come to us as the lucubrations of a solitary wise man, grappling with American history, with race, with fate and freedom.

WE DO FEEL READY to blame someone. Clinton’s campaign was doomed from the start. “Not our President”? Not our Party either. The Democrats — festooned this season with celebrities and capitalists to an unthinking degree — rarely talked about what workers and the dispossessed needed to build their li…