Many voted in 2008 with the desire to see racism and racists humiliated by having a qualified black man elected president.

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

The first black president will be a politician who is black.

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it.

Since Obama has expressed admiration for the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that Doris Kearns Goodwin paints in Team of Rivals, he could do the 16th president one better: He should name Hillary Clinton as his running mate in 2012. That would be both needed change and audacious.

In the class that I teach at one University, I stress that my one-word definition of politics is money. You can't name a subject matter that money doesn't touch.