Obama

“People don’t come to Obama for what he’s done,” said Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group devoted to centrist policies.

“They come because of what they hope he can be.”

Later that year, his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, would tell me, “When he was a young man, I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He said, ‘I want to leave the world a better place than when I came in.’ And I believe that has been his guiding light.”