Grace.

Amazing grace.


This came very close to being the worst week of Barack Obama’s presidency, and, effectively, the last: a possible repudiation from both Congress and the Supreme Court, from his own party, from a country struggling with the same racial tensions he’s approached with a caution that’s often come across more like muted fear.

He would have been a failed president. He would have been a failed promise.

Instead, Obama finished the week in Charleston singing, really singing, and returned to a White House lit up like a rainbow that people who wanted to celebrate just felt drawn to. Hours after the partying stopped, they stayed late into the night, just sitting and staring at the building and thinking about how much had just changed.

What Obama first represented as a half-white, half-black man of a new generation, with the middle name Hussein and all the rest, seemed to have actually arrived in America — that guy America voted for in 2008 seemed to suddenly (and to a lot of his supporters, finally) show up. So did the country they voted for.

And Obama’s voice broke through in a way that it hasn’t, maybe, since the 2004 keynote address that introduced him to America. A week that started with the media obsessing over one charged word he said ended with the country glued to his whole 25-minute eulogy in South Carolina on how the country is a whole lot more racist but also a whole lot more hopeful than it likes to admit, reverberating and replaying on the news, on iPhones and on YouTube all through the night and weekend.

Obama often talks about his presidency as just trying to write his paragraph in history.

The past week, said Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, is “an exclamation point on already historic and satisfying paragraphs.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday captured the frustration of those who feel the country’s changed too much and too quickly under their feet, calling the Supreme Court rulings “some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” in a radio interview with Sean Hannity.

Even inside the White House, the rush of change is almost overwhelming.

“The country is emerging in a way that is interesting and different — and we’re all taking it all in,” said a senior White House aide. Obama’s “voice and his role in a lot of these issues were important for him personally, and for his presidency.”

When an Ebola panic set in, when Baltimore rioted, when American hostages were killed in yet another stumble against ISIL, the country demanded he respond. This week, however, Americans really wanted to hear what he had to say.

Obama and his aides are determined to seize this moment, though they’re still not quite sure what that will mean beyond getting him and his voice out more.

“What we did this week was very intentional,” the White House aide said. “This is what he wants to do.”

The singing, though, wasn’t in the script.

The Obama White House is a superstitious place, where meetings often have to pause for everyone in the room to knock on wood (or whatever the nearest conference table is made of) when anyone does. There was a lot of extra wood knocking at the beginning of the week: court decisions on health care and gay marriage that they couldn’t control but they knew could damage the president’s legacy, a nagging nervousness about the last few steps on fast-track trade authority, warily eyeing the discussion about race in the wake of a vicious massacre, worries about whether the eulogy would hit the mark that they knew America needed it to.

“There was a sense of tension,” said Plouffe, who dropped by the White House on a trip through Washington earlier in the week.

On Friday, after the Supreme Court had declared a right to gay marriage just a day after upholding a key provision of Obamacare, a lot of people were high-fiving and hugging each other around the West Wing, saying, “Can you imagine if this had all gone the other way?”

In the helicopter on the way to Andrews to fly to Charleston, Obama started talking to some of his staff about the eulogy he would deliver at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, gunned down with fellow worshippers in his own church by a man determined to start a race war. Obama had been spending a lot of time thinking about “Amazing Grace” as he wrote the eulogy deep into Thursday night and Friday morning. He’d just celebrated the second Supreme Court decision in a row in the Rose Garden. Maybe he’d sing.

Five days of emotion, validation and vindication, said senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was traveling with him, “gave him an opportunity to capture the attention, the imagination and the potential of the American people. You have to seize those opportunities, and this week he did.”

He took the stage in Charleston still not sure what he’d do. He got to the moment in his prepared text. He sang the first two words, paused, watched and listened to the reaction. He finished the first line, paused again. And then he and 6,000 people were all singing together.

The thing about a black church, one of the bishops who’d been on stage joked later in the day, is that if they’re not with you, they’ll just stare at you and let you sing — but if they’re with you, they’ll be on their feet, clapping and singing and following your lead.

Obama, the bishop said, could have kept them going for the whole second verse, too.

No one could have predicted seven years ago that the pro-gay rights Human Rights Campaign could have shown up at the Supreme Court on Friday morning confident enough that its “Love Wins” balloons were already inflated. No one could have predicted on the morning that nine African-Americans were gunned down at Bible study that the Confederate flag would start coming down around the country, almost by acclamation.

Few would have guessed that at this point in Obama’s presidency, having overseen years of historic Democratic losses in Congress and statehouses, Obama would be at all relevant to the political conversation — and yet so far, the Republican and Democratic primary fields have both largely been a debate about him and what he’s doing.

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Meanwhile, progressives on the Hill, especially those still burning over how hard he steamrolled them on trade, are rolling their eyes at the lionizing. Remember, they point out, that many of the big things Obama gets the credit for didn’t originate with him — people like Nancy Pelosi were pushing him further on health care than the White House wanted to go, or out in favor of a gay marriage plank in the 2012 convention platform when he was still deciding what to say.

“They’ve been pushed into everything they’ve ever done,” one senior Democratic Hill staffer griped Saturday morning, expressing that feeling.

The last time there was an impromptu party in front of the White House, it was the night Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Six and a half years in, Obama’s America is now officially more “Modern Family” than “24.”

The Obama people are true believers, the kind of people who spent Friday at the White House and in bars afterward hugging each other, saying “this is what we fought for.”

“We did a good thing,” Plouffe said he wrote to a fellow Obama ’08 alum on Friday night, urging anyone who questions what they delivered to go back to Obama’s 2007 kickoff speech in Springfield and note the consistency.

Or, more sarcastically: “When America elected a proudly progressive President ’08, conservatives had a lot of nightmare scenarios, this is the week they came true,” former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted Friday afternoon.

When he got back from Charleston on Friday, Obama didn’t join the party. He went right into the residence, to spend the evening with his wife and his family and get a chance to take in all that happened.

“The equilibrium of the country has moved to some extent more to the left, and the equilibrium of the country is being moved by the sensibilities of millennials for whom human rights, civil rights mean more,” said National Urban League president Marc Morial, standing on Friday afternoon outside the church where the shooting happened after listening to the president give the eulogy. “We can’t go back to yesterday.”

Yesterday’s a long time ago.