Two observations, after watching Barack Obama’s first post-election press conference:

• It is, as others have noted, a genuine pleasure — after eight long painful years — to hear our new President speaking in complete sentences and giving intelligent answers to unscripted questions.
• My expectations for Obama have always been realistic: I thought he was the right candidate at the right time,1 and I supported him from day one, but I didn’t think he would lead us to the Promised Land or anything.

  That said, I’m starting to get the impression that we’ve all misunderstood — or underestimated — what Obama meant when he called himself a community organizer. At first I thought this meant merely that Obama had done hard yards in urban neighborhoods, had worked to bring jobs to communities, pull together voter registration drives, and so on: Good work, necessary work, but not an unusual activity or a sign of exceptional talent.

  Now I’m starting to think Obama meant community organizer as “a person who organizes communities” — that is, a person who recognizes (or creates) a shared purpose, and then organizes a community to achieve it. And, I’m starting to think, Obama has Einstein-level talent at this type of organizing: He’s rolling straight from the best-organized presidential campaign we’ve ever seen to the best-organized transition team we’ve ever seen, and shows no signs of stopping there.

  And this is Obama’s hidden talent. When all is said and done, Obama’s speech-making skills will be measured against Churchill and King and Lincoln — and I think people underestimate Obama because they pigeonhole him as a great public speaker, and assume his organizing skills are a secondary talent. In fact, the opposite is true: Obama’s soaring speeches are a gateway talent, and Obama’s real strength is that he’s devastatingly efficient at turning inspiration into action.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

1. Specifically, I thought he was the first vote-with-your-heart candidate the Democrats had put forward in a long time, as opposed to vote-with-your-head candidates like John Kerry and the 2000 edition of Al Gore. [↩]

Listen to this excerpt from Barack Obama’s latest speech, in particular his choice of words at 0:52:

…and then read this:

¹² For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

That’s Ephesians 6:12. When Obama talks about powers and principalities dividing us, and says it’s “the oldest trick in the book,” he’s talking about the Book, and he’s paraphrasing Scripture.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Ever wonder what would have happened if Luke had said yes when Vader offered to make him co-Emperor?

I think John McCain is finding out this week. I’m not sure where Obama fits into this analogy (though I suspect Obama’s Star Wars name actually is “Barack Obama”), but my impression of McCain has gone this route.