As he stood in the brittle winter sunshine on the west portico of the Capitol on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama gave the most anticipated political speech of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Obama delivered his inaugural address before a crowd of 1.8 million people, more than had ever before seen a president take the oath of office. Obama created such excitement partly because, as the first African American president, his election proved, as he himself had declared on election night in November 2008, that “America is a place where all things are possible.” He had inspired millions of Americans with his eloquence and his promise to bring “change” at a time when an economic collapse was devastating individual lives and when American forces remained engaged in two long and controversial wars. In his first speech as president, Obama offered the American people hope that the nation would meet these serious challenges, but he stated frankly that success would not come easily or “in a short span of time.” He asked his fellow citizens to join him in “a new era of responsibility” and to draw on the values of the past to “begin again the work of remaking America.”