Updated:
December 13, 2020 07:40 IST
Barack Obama plays observer, analyst and judge as he looks back at his historic time in the White House, where he chose to be a pragmatic centrist
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Barack Obama plays observer, analyst and judge as he looks back at his historic time in the White House, where he chose to be a pragmatic centrist
On January 20, 2009, before his inauguration as the first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were driven to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington DC, a block away from the White House. In the ‘Church of the Presidents’, as it’s often called, the Obamas had arranged a private service by their friend T.D. Jakes. The Dallas pastor, in his sermon, told the story from the Old Testament about the three men who refused to bow down to the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II, because they were faithful to God. They were thrown into a blazing furnace, but emerged unscathed as God protected them. What the pastor meant was that the presidency is the furnace. “But so long as I stayed true to God and to doing what was right, I too had nothing to fear,” writes Obama in the first part of his memoirs on his presidency,