Nine ‘amazing’ moments from Obama’s presidency

Talking to Valerie Jarrett about her time as senior adviser to President Barack Obama and specifically about that time he sang “Amazing Grace” in Charleston, S.C., on June 26, 2015, got me to thinking about other amazing moments of the Obama presidency. So, before Obama nostalgia hits full-tilt after New Year's Day, here are nine “amazing” moments from his presidency.

“Donald Trump is here tonight!”

Donald Trump loves being the center of attention, even negative attention. But as we learned in 2016, the roasting of the Big Apple builder by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner “accelerated (Trump's) ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world.”

“Donald Trump is here tonight! Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter - like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

On Nov. 8, Trump went from butt-of-the-joke to president-elect.

“The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden.”

What made Obama's focus on Trump on April 30, 2011, all the more extraordinary was what was happening at the exact same time. Unbeknownst to anyone except senior aides, the president authorized the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader who unleashed horror on the United States with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The president's late-night announcement on May 1 of the mission's success led to celebrations in front of the White House and in New York.

“You lie!”

Nothing personified the peevish relationship between congressional Republicans and the president more than this remarkable moment during a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9, 2009. It proved to be a harbinger of disrespectful things to come.

Obama was trying to save his push for health care reform. “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants,” he said. “This, too, is false - the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., yelled, “You lie!” It was a stunning breach of decorum and protocol that left then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agape and Vice President Joe Biden shaking his lowered head. Obama glared and continued, “It's not true.”

The president was right.

“I have no more campaigns to run.”

The reticence that Obama displayed amid Republican taunting in the well of the House of Representatives in 2009 was gone during his State of the Union address in 2015. As he called on the nation to pursue “a better politics,” the president reminded the gathered, “I have no more campaigns to run.”

The ensuing GOP-led applause evoked a moment of epic presidential shade. Looking over at the Republicans, Obama said, “I know because I won both of them.” And did he. Obama is the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to win at least 51 percent of the vote twice.

“Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad.”

The murder of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, 2012, shocked the national conscience. But not enough to spur Congress to pass any legislation that could possibly keep guns out of the hands of folks who really shouldn't have them. Nearly four years and many more mass shootings later, Obama announced new executive actions on gun control. Yet, the emotion of Newtown was still present as tears streamed down the usually stoic president's face when he mentioned the lost little ones.

“First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun.

“Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad. And by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day.

“So all of us need to demand a Congress brave enough to stand up to the gun lobby's lies. All of us need to stand up and protect its citizens. All of us need to demand governors and legislatures and businesses do their part to make our communities safer. We need the wide majority of responsible gun owners who grieve with us every time this happens and feel like your views are not being properly represented to join with us to demand something better.”

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

When the president walked into the White House press briefing room on July 19, 2013, he caught the press corps by surprise not only with his presence but also by what he had to say. The nation was reeling from the not guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, in Sanford, Florida on Feb. 26, 2012. And what Obama did was give voice to the frustration and fear that had gripped the black community then.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” the president said. “And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.”

A year later, starting with the July 2014 death of Eric Garner captured on video by a bystander, the American people would see one too many times what African Americans had been railing against for generations.

“I want to know if my hair is just like yours”

While walking through the West Wing of the White House in 2009, I saw what has remained my all-time favorite photo of the Obama presidency. Jacob Philadelphia, then 5 years old, was in the Oval Office with his family to take a photo with the president. The little guy had a request. “I want to know if my hair is just like yours,” Jacob asked Obama. Hands in his pocket, the president bowed his head for Jacob to have a touch.

There is a lot going on in that photo that stopped me dead in my tracks when I saw it nearly eight years ago. For a host of reasons owing to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, we African Americans are sensitive about our heads and our hair. So Obama allowing his head to be touched by a stranger was already remarkable.

But what got me is the obvious connection the little guy was making between himself and the black man who was also president of the United States. As I wrote after Jackie Calmes of the New York Times reported on the picture, what White House photographer Pete Souza was able to capture was how Obama addressed so much about race without ever opening his mouth.

Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis

On March 7, 1965, John Lewis and many others were savagely beaten by law enforcement at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they started the Selma-to-Montgomery, Alabama marches for voting rights. Fifty years later, Lewis, a leader of that march, returned to the site of “Bloody Sunday” as a 15-term member of Congress from Georgia and as a guest of the nation's first African American president.

There, in that setting, those two men represented how far our nation has come since its not-so-distant Jim Crow past. That one is president and the other is a member of Congress shows what the American people are capable of when they see their fellow citizens being violently abused for demanding basic civil rights and human dignity. Obama's 2015 speech commemorating the Alabama marches was masterful in its clear-eyed view of our ongoing journey toward a more perfect union.

June 26, 2015

You'll recall that this was the date the president flew to Charleston and sang “Amazing Grace” while eulogizing Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who was murdered with eight parishioners by avowed racist Dylann Roof a week earlier. But that was also the day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry.

Everyone saw this coming. Over the years, lower court rulings in favor of marriage equality and actions by various states to legalize same-sex unions laid the groundwork for that historic decision. Still, to have it officially happen, to have marriage equality become the law of the land, marked a high point in our nation's effort to be more just and more fair.

From ending the ban on LGBT service members from serving openly in the military to no longer defending the so-called Defense of Marriage Act against constitutional challenge, Obama earned his honorary “first gay president” moniker from Newsweek.

But as sweet as the Supreme Court victory was, nothing was more moving than what happened at the White House that evening. As darkness crept over Washington, the residence became aglow in the rainbow colors of the LGBT pride flag. Never before had the people's house been so adorned. Never before had the dignity of LGBT people been so publicly supported by their president. Amazing.

As an openly gay African American man who will marry his partner next year, I will forever be grateful to this president for fighting for me, for us.

Jonathan Capehart is an editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post.