My friend Matt Yglesias posted an Obama flashback earlier today, to one blogger's response at the time to the 2004 DNC speech that launched a 42-year-old Illinois state senator's national political career. An even more amazing artifact, though, is the below video of TV pundits' first response to that speech. Jim Lehrer, Mark Shields, David Brooks, and Richard Norton Smith are spellbound, dumbfounded, knocked off their feet. Brooks says, "This is why you go into this business, to watch a speech like this." My favorite part is when Smith says, very carefully, "People talk about him, quite openly, as the first black president of the United States."
--Ben Wasserstein