I play it cool/I dig all jive/That's the reason I stay alive.

—Langston Hughes

PHILADELPHIA—On the crowded convention floor on Wednesday night, as the President of the United States gave his heart and his soul to the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed him, I found a spot to stand with the delegation from Louisiana, which has been the center of so much heartbreak and redemption over the past 10 years, and which also is the place where the American concept of cool was born, the one that captured the world through a million silver trumpets.

If he has done nothing else, and he has done a great deal, Barack Obama has developed an aesthetic of cool that is his alone. It expands and extends from the way he does his job; the video prior to his appearance emphasized how he always was the calm presence in the middle of heated policy debates. It also includes the way he has carried himself in office, and the way he has carried the office itself—lightly, in its ceremonial aspects, but carefully and reverently in those parts of the job that belong most importantly to the rest of us.

He remains a graceful, cosmopolitan democrat, not unlike Thomas Jefferson, not unlike Langston Hughes, not unlike Albert Murray. His patriotism is wide and generous. It has no definite frontiers. And that's what was born in Louisiana, in the streets and the clubs and the brothels. It came from there, and it fought racism to at least a draw. It came from there, and it conquered the world. And that was the place he went to when he threw the jab that stung the deepest.

And that's why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own.

That got the Louisiana folks out of their chairs.

That's why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That's why our military can look the way it does—every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.

He almost swallowed the words "homegrown demagogues." Compared to the rest of the passage, you had to seek it out, to find the way he linked the Republican nominee to fascists and communists and (gulp) jihadists. But the meaning was clear, and the shot was clean. It was Ali, coming off the ropes in the eighth round in Zaire. There was an elegance to the way he threw it. There was an elegance and a purity to the way it landed. The boldness of the charge was the least part of its sting.

It was Ali, coming off the ropes in the eighth round in Zaire.

The first piece to explore a president's attempt to construct an aesthetic of cool was, of course, Norman Mailer's classic study of John F. Kennedy in Esquire, "Superman Comes to the Supermart." Mailer's observational genius, an exercise of cool in its own right, allowed him to see how Kennedy's tailored Irish cool allowed him to ring changes in the Democratic Party's traditional themes. Mailer wrote:

So the boss is depressed, profoundly depressed. He comes to this convention resigned to nominating a man he does not understand, or let us say that, so far as he understands the candidate who is to be nominated, he is not happy about the secrets of his appeal, not so far as he divines these secrets; they seem to have too little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation which had thousands—or was it hundreds of thousands—of people demonstrating in the long night before Chessman was killed, and a movie star, the greatest, Marlon the Brando out in the night with them. Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.

Barack Obama did the same thing, in 2008, and it is one of history's happy ironies that he did it to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Obama's campaign kept catching Clinton's campaign on the wrong foot, the way Kennedy's pinstriped guerrillas outmaneuvered the bosses and Hubert Humphrey, and even the master politician himself, Lyndon Johnson, who was the de Castries to Kennedy's Giap. Obama's campaign was swift. It cornered on a dime. It was a step ahead throughout the campaign until it had re-imagined what it took to become President of the United States, as surely as—and certainly more thoroughly than—Kennedy's did in 1960. On Thursday night, that aesthetic of cool broadened itself to envelop even the person whose campaign it had defeated eight years earlier.

You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office. You can read about it. You can study it. But until you've sat at that desk, you don't know what it's like to manage a global crisis, or send young people to war. But Hillary has been in the room; she's been part of those decisions. She knows what's at stake in the decisions our government makes—what's at stake for the working family, for the senior citizen or the small business owner, for the soldier, for the veteran. And even in the midst of crisis, she listens to people, and she keeps her cool, and she treats everybody with respect. And no matter how daunting the odds, no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits. That is the Hillary I know. That's the Hillary I've come to admire. And that's why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman—not me, not Bill, nobody—more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States of America. I hope you don't mind, Bill, but I was just telling the truth, man.

The last line was an improv, a riff that came to him in the moment. He delivered it with a sly smile that was returned, from high above, from Bill Clinton, old country kid, sneaking off to the moonlit juke in rice country to hear the music that his preacher told him was the road to hell. It was a moment to rise to, a tribute to American cool from one of its acolytes to someone so deeply attached to its source that he was able to refashion it and apply it to the hardest job in the world. And the people in the Louisiana delegation saw it for what it was—a tribute paid by the fruit to the root.

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So much of the president's aesthetic of cool comes from his ability to internalize the original promises of the country, the ones made by people who owned other people as property, who talked big but lived small, and to transform them into his own language, to run riffs on Jefferson the way John Coltrane ran riffs on Rodgers and Hammerstein. There was a lot of that on Wednesday night, too. It was one of the main melody lines in the speech.

We're not a fragile people. We're not a frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don't look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that We the People, can form a more perfect union. That's who we are. That's our birthright—the capacity to shape our own destiny. That's what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny and our GIs to liberate a continent. It's what gave women the courage to reach for the ballot, and marchers to cross a bridge in Selma, and workers to organize and fight for collective bargaining and better wages. America has never been about what one person says he'll do for us. It's about what can be achieved by us, together—through the hard and slow, and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.

That is not necessarily jazz, not specifically, not by the criteria that the great Albert Murray laid down in an article in The New Republic shortly after an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama had dazzled his first Democratic National Convention in Boston:

In any case, the jazz musician's blues should not be confused with the torch singer's lament, which is a matter of wearing one's heart on one's sleeve because one has loved unwisely and not well and has become not the one and only, but the lonely, "ain't these tears in these eyes telling you." In this sense, Billie Holiday's famous recording "Strange Fruit" is not blues music. It is a political torch song, a lament about unrequited patriotic love. We have loved and fought and died for this country for all these many years, the song asserts, because it has been our official homeland for this many generations, and now just look at what some of these other folks think they have a right to do to somebody because they want to think that they are better than them.

The president is all those things—jazz musician, torch singer, politician, president—all fashioned from his own aesthetic derived from the hidden music he found in our common history. He appropriated optimism and the best elements of that tired, loaded concept called American Exceptionalism. My lord, he even jacked Ronald Reagan, ringing his own changes on the shining city on the hill. He is cool in all the ways that matter.

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And, suddenly, just like that, it was done. Barack Obama had given the last great speech of his career as president. There will be other appearances on other stages—out on the stump for HRC, probably an eloquent valedictory when he leaves office—but this was the last time a really big stage would be his alone, and he played it up to the rafters. They cranked Stevie Wonder in the arena, and the Louisiana delegation danced and sang along. "I've been such an instrumental part of the Obama campaign, and then to be a supporter of all his policies, to see that it's all coming to an end, but it's not coming to an end," said Senator Karen Carter Peterson, the state Democratic chairperson. "But it's not really coming to an end, because we're starting another chapter with another historic moment. God is good."

On stage, a young black man, the President of the United States, warmly embraced an older white woman in front of God and all the world. It is now an iconic photograph. If it had occurred on a weed-choked street in Mississippi within the lifetime of many of the people who were cheering the moment, the young man might have been beaten, burned, hung, thrown into a river with a cotton fan tied to his neck. A song began to rise through the history of the moment:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees…

But it was not those days any longer. The young man was the President of the United States, and he has rung his changes on that song, and on an occasionally baffled democracy. Surely, he has done that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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