Twelve years ago, almost to the day, Barack Obama’s flight from Springfield, Ill., landed in Boston around 4 a.m. He paced around the lobby of the Back Bay Hilton, ran into his campaign press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and together they contemplated the keynote speech Obama would deliver to the Democratic National Convention the next night. Sleep was not in the immediate plan for Obama, who was then running to become the only African-American in the United States Senate. He would head out again at 6 a.m. to tape “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation” and “Late Edition” on CNN. It was not the normal Sunday morning regimen for little-known state lawmakers.  But then, things had become aggressively abnormal for Obama since John Kerry had picked him to be the keynote speaker at his nominating convention. Obama figured this was a moment in time and that the fuss would subside soon enough. “I’m not someone who takes the hype that seriously,” Obama told me when I met him a few hours later.  He was making the rounds of a brunch hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus held aboard a docked cruise ship in Boston Harbor. I was assigned to write an article on Obama, then 42, that same day, and met up with him as he boarded the boat. Obama addressed me as “the guy from The Washington Post,” my employer at the time. He kept telling me, and the many people that kept rushing up to him, that he was desperate for a nap. I found this somewhat audacious and endearing. He seemed to have somewhere between eight and 12 seconds of political nicety in him for everyone before he would declare what he would rather be doing (“I need a nap”) and move on.  He was never a natural, draw-energy-from-the-crowd politician like Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush. When we could steal a few seconds, Obama kept emphasizing to me that this was all temporary, that the fuss would all end soon enough. He had some experience with riding small waves of national acclaim, after all, having been named the first African-American editor of The Harvard Law Review several years earlier. “After about two weeks, all the stories were written and everyone left me alone,” he said.  That, of course, never happened in this case. Normalcy would be an early casualty of what would come next for Obama, beginning with that 2004 keynote. It’s not really clear, in retrospect, whether Obama really believed he was a mere “flavor of the month, or the flavor of the week, or whatever,” as he told me; or whether he was deftly practicing the faux modesty required of a politician otherwise amply equipped with self regard.  But it’s hard not to look back on those flavor-of-the-month days in Boston as Obama prepares to make his last speech as a sitting president to the Democratic Convention. He could very well allude to that keynote from the lectern tonight, no doubt contrasting, as he likes to do, his black hair of then with the deep gray of now. He could very well invoke the unifying themes that he struck in what was the first national convention after 9/11. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” Obama said in one of that speech’s most quoted lines. “There’s the United States of America.”  The speech became a touchstone of national unity and a soaring manifesto of hope that would form the foundation of his 2008 presidential campaign. It would also represent, strikingly, the exact opposite tenor of Obama’s two terms in office. He is no longer a flavor of the month, and today’s flavor is a very different one of division.  Obama will stand on the convention podium tonight in the midst of a fractured, tense and violent time in America. The 2016 presidential campaign has served as a bizarre and awful corollary to a stretch that can seem frighteningly off the rails. Obama will make his address tonight a few hours after the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, said today in a rambling news conference that he hoped the Russians would hack into his opponent’s email to reveal the contents of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.  In the perversity of this atmosphere, Democrats seem to be sensing a moment of bipartisan opportunity – a kind of backdoor unity campaign that could bring mainstream Republicans into their camp. The big speeches of Monday and Tuesday nights were both strikingly nonpartisan and included easy nods to the other side. Michelle Obama emphasized the shared imperative of picking a president best equipped to ensure better futures for children. “This November, when we go to the polls this is what we’re deciding,” she said. “Not Democrat or Republican, not left or right.” Bill Clinton last night quoted Newt Gingrich’s praise of his wife and also mentioned her past collaboration with another longtime Democratic boogeyman, Tom DeLay. It’s as if the Democrats are almost nostalgic for having normal, familiar Republican opponents and engaging in a retroactive normalization of past partisan norms. What a bizarre year.  And now comes Obama, in what many will see as a valedictory coda to his 2004 debut. It’s a big speech for Obama, no doubt. It feels bigger than the usual, even for an old gray pro that set out 12 years ago, thinking he could rest soon enough.  Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for the magazine.
The Democratic National Convention address that launched a presidency, and the one that will begin drawing it to a close.