Today, I am hopeful. The day is bright, despite the gray weather. I have nothing to fear from my national leader.

Barack Obama is our new president.

I witnessed the Obama experience a couple years ago when I covered his appearance at Bellevue Community College for the King County Journal.

Then, he was pretty much testing the political waters. But, boy did he make a splash with the partisan Democratic crowd in Bellevue.

What I remember as much about that day is our state’s political cheerleader in chief, Christine Gregoire. She whipped the crowd into a frenzy with her own loud cheers and loud clapping.

It’s a vision of our governor that I have always remembered.

But down the center of the filled-to-the-brim hall at BCC came Obama to wild adulation. It was a young crowd. That proved prescient. I was still trying to figure out why he was such a phenomenon. Gregoire knew.

Perhaps the taint from the day came when some Republican faithful weren’t allowed to voice their opinion or go inside the hall, wearing t-shirts that clearly marked them as Republicans.

I am guessing that none of the organizers asked Obama for his opinion about whether the small group of Republicans should come inside. I think he would have said “Yes, they are welcome.”

That’s why I don’t fear Obama. He embodies the ideal of inclusion, the idea of the “big tent,” something the Republicans like to claim as their own.

I won’t say that Obama rises to the level of the charisma of John F. Kennedy. He’ll have to earn JFK’s mantle of hope. Kennedy was a man of the people, of any land. He made that clear in Berlin, in June 1963, when he said in one of his most famous speeches, “I am a Berliner.”

But Obama has the potential. Like Kennedy’s, his speech in Chicago after his victory was assured was meant to inspire.

“I am an American,” he said.

Today, that is something we can all say with pride.

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