Various fawning excerpts from different sources on “The One,” Barack Obama.

The African slaves who provided most of the labor that built the White House never imagined that a black man would ever own embossed stationery that read “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Even the dreamer himself, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., might not have imagined that 40 short years after his murder, we would be planning an Inauguration of the first man of African descent to ascend to the presidency. No minority of any ethnicity had ever looked beyond the scarce representation of a few Senators and seen anything that suggested that the doorknob of the Oval Office could be opened by anything other than the hand of a middle-aged white male.

As Barack Hussein Obama places his brown hand on that black Bible and takes his oath, it will not make him merely the

President of blacks who admire him nor leave him indebted to whites who assisted him. He cannot acquiesce to the liberals who support him nor vilify the conservatives who don’t. He must remain a philosophical centrist who garners our best and brightest from both sides of the aisle. He must transcend all of that and rise to the global perspective of his calling and through it serve his God,

Step Grandmother Sarah in Kenya

his country and the rainbow coalition of the people of this great nation. We can hope he can re-establish the international respect we have lost and gradually convince the watching, waiting world that a change for us is good for them.

From the Kool-Aid soaked mind of Joe Klein:

But this election was about much more than issues. It was the ratification of an essential change in the nature of the country.

It was an act of nostalgia, harking back to the “real” America — white, homogeneous, small-town — that the McCain campaign unsuccessfully tried to appeal to.

I suspect the headline is that it is no longer homogeneous. It is no longer a “white” country, even though whites remain the majority. It is a place where the primacy of racial identity — and this includes the old, Jesse Jackson version of black racial identity — has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy.

Tell that to the black panthers at the polling places.

After eight years of misgovernance, it has lost some of its global swagger … but also some of its arrogance. It may no longer be as dominant, economically or diplomatically, as it once was. But it is younger, more optimistic, less cynical. It is a country that retains its ability to startle the world — and in a good way, with our freedom. It is a place, finally, where the content of our President’s character is more important than the color of his skin.

There is going to be a lot of disappointed people in a couple of years if “The One” doesn’t deliver on his promises.

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