Exit the Boy King - NYT

I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the helicopter’s path out of town. - By MAUREEN DOWD

NVDL: Classy, insightful writer.

clipped from www.nytimes.com It was a morning of such enormous emotion and portent — jaw-dropping, Dow-dropping and barrier-dropping — that even the cool new president had to feel daunted to see his blocks-long motorcade and two million hope-besotted faces beaming up at him, dreaming that he can save their shirts. After thanking President Bush “for his service to our nation,” Mr. Obama executed a high-level version of Stephen Colbert’s share-the-stage smackdown of W. at the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2006. With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation, as he did with Colbert, who Mr. Obama’s target was — (Is he talking about me? Is 44 saying I messed everything up?) — the newly minted president let him have it: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he said to wild applause (and to Bartlett’s), adding: “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”