Go to the Globe and Mail homepage  Jump to main navigationJump
to main content  David Shribman  What happened to Obama? His
office Add to ...  Executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette  It began with such promise, with history whispering,
with hopes soaring. Here was a new president, the first African-
American to win the White House, and even his critics knew there
was something special to his inauguration, that great-
grandchildren yet unborn would be taught that, on Jan. 20, 2009,
Barack Obama became the leader of a nation that nearly a century
and a half earlier had held blacks in the cruel bondage of
slavery.  More Related to this Story  Now, a year later, the
historic aura remains, the more so perhaps because the sight of
a black man and his family in the White House today seems so
utterly unremarkable. But it is unmistakable and incontestable
that the magic is gone and, along with it, the sense that all
things were possible, that all crises could be handled, that all
challenges could be met - that