Gwen Ifill Quotes

African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.

Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries?

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

To try and act like we haven't had great progress is not true. Obama didn't fail - he changed the psyche of the nation and, in some ways, the world.

For even the most seasoned observers of American politics, Barack Obama is a phenomenon.

In '08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I'd supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he'd won. I really hadn't thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so.

I momentarily but genuinely believed that Barack Obama was the answer not only to our nation's depressing politics but to the question of our racial enlightenment.

That someone like Obama could be elected president of the United States - with its unrivaled power and prestige - has begun to restore the country's and the world's faith in America as the land of opportunity.

America was magnificently characterized in November of 2008 when we elected, for the first time, an African-American President of the United States.

I don't really feel McCain. It ain't just because Barack is black; he can make change. Just like Bush equals recession, Barack equals progression.

Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood - not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.

I had great admiration for the election of President Obama. I believe that the U.S. at that moment showed tremendous capacity to show that it is a great nation, and it surprised the world. It may be very difficult to be able to elect a black president in the U.S. - as it was very difficult to elect a woman president in Brazil.

I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.

The people in East Germany have lived through so many changes in the last 15 years like never before in the country, and they did this often with great enthusiasm. But in the West we also have a high degree of transformations.

We do have a black president, and that means a lot. People ask, 'What has he done?' What he's done is change the color up, which you see on the screen. When the head of the free world is black, there's got to be some sort of spin-off from it.

In 2008, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going for him. He was an African-American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad for eight years.

... the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.

You cannot change the psychology of a people by a coup d'etat, or by some quick process of political chemistry convert an idle nobleman into a serious worker, or a medical student into a full-blown statesman.

I don't think that the United States are ready for a presidency as the one of Obama, at least because he would be the first black president.

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.

I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there - all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.

America is Tiger Woods country for a reason, and she elected Barack Obama to punctuate this new reality.