Via: NewsOne.com
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WASHINGTON — At 8:35 a.m. on Jan. 21, 2009, Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office for the first time as president, the hopes of the nation on his shoulders. He spent 10 minutes alone, soaking in the moment, then set about trying to deliver on the bold promises he had laid out in his inaugural address a day earlier.
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In a cruel fluke of the calendar, at precisely the one-year mark in his presidency, Obama awoke Wednesday to headlines shouting about the Republican takeover of a U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, an election that represented far more than a shift of a legislator from one side of the aisle to the other.
Gone was the Democrats’ filibuster-resistant 60-seat majority in the Senate, and with it a clear pathway to Obama’s prized health care overhaul.
Gone, too, was the sense of heady optimism that infused the country 12 months earlier to the day.
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The yes-we-can candidate had summoned the nation to join him in “remaking America” and confidently proclaimed: “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.”
One year later, the ground has shifted beneath Obama himself.
