"Tuesday night was a beautiful night for those who admire President Obama for his temperament, his intelligence, his calm, his decency, and his refusal, in the face of obviously intense daughterly pressure, to buy a second dog. (Let the word go forth from this day on: one dog is delightful —but one is enough.) It also sealed in place, by real but still smallish margins—and therefore as though it were a fated necessity rather than a contingent achievement— the Obama phenomenon. It is still one of the most singular stories in American history: how a slight black guy from Chicago with an odd African name and no resume except a single shining speech and a fine, introspective literary memoir became the dominant political figure of an American empire still at the height of its power. Nothing so improbable has happened in a big democracy, or semi-democracy, since Disraeli’s day. And, once again, one marvelled at the ability of Obama’s opponents to hate with such a passion a man so seemingly impossible even for his teen-age daughter to dislike—a man who never takes the bait of rage, who sometimes seeks conciliation to crazy fault, and has said scarcely an angry, mean-spirited, or intemperate thing in his public life." — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker