Obama Transformed

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/06/obama_s_clementa_pinckney_eulogy_in_a_week_the_president_went_from_dejection.html

Obama Transformed

The remarkable week that roused the president from dejection and inspired a stirring call to action.
By John Dickerson

President Barack Obama delivers the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney during Pinckney’s funeral service on June 26, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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The president was no longer giving a speech about a tragedy; he was trying to leverage the grace displayed in the wake of that heinous act into a nation’s purpose. “As a nation out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us,” he said. “He has allowed us to see where we have been blind.” It was that grace, the president argued, that helped South Carolina lawmakers conclude that the Confederate flag should come down.

But there was more power in grace than simply providing the impetus to lower a flag. “He has given us the chance where we have been lost to find our best selves,” the president said. “We may not have earned grace, but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway.” And that means, he continued, that America has a duty: “It is up to us now to make the most of it. To receive it with gratitude and prove ourselves worthy of this gift.”

The president then outlined the worthy fights, from lessening gun violence to tackling poverty to improving race relations. If you were moved by the response to the shooting, he was arguing, then you have a commitment to be true to what inspired that moving response. If Americans make those commitments and stay focused on improving those injustices, the president said, “by doing that, we express God’s grace.”

This was not a rhetorical exercise, or not merely one. It was a demonstration of the power the president had found in the example of the people of Charleston—both the living and the dead. He wasn’t just telling. He was showing—the power he was trying to summon in this speech came from his own feeling of gratitude and obligation to serve as an example of grace. Even if you didn’t agree with any of what the president said, the distance the president traveled in this one week was a kind of testimony of its own. By the end of his oration, the president was leading the congregation in an impromptu rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

It was the second time in the day, and the third time in two days, that the president had made testimonials to the power of keeping the faith. Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled on a legislative interpretation that allowed the Affordable Care Act to survive, enshrining the president’s signature legislative achievement after years of pitched battle. Friday, the Supreme Court announced that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, rooted in the 14th Amendment, written in the wake of the Civil War to grant citizenship to people once enslaved.

Speaking in the Rose Garden on Friday morning the president said the same-sex marriage ruling was a testament to the power of perseverance in the struggle. “Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

The thunderbolts of change that struck this week seem to have energized the president. He might have given the same eulogy had he not had his opinions affirmed by the Supreme Court. But given the sense of vindication that he feels, it was easy to see how those secular victories gave him the confidence to make that soaring religious speech and to wipe away the intimations toward capitulation and defeat from just a little more than a week ago.