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 First 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.”