These are our kids. This is what they’re thinking about. And so what we should be thinking about is our responsibility to care for them, and shield t… - Barack Obama

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? I'm not talking about blind optimism here... No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.

In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.

Toot showed me how to balance a checkbook and resist buying stuff I didn’t need. She was the reason why, even in my most revolutionary moments as a young man, I could admire a well-run business and read the financial pages, and why I felt compelled to disregard overly broad claims about the need to tear things up and remake society from whole cloth. She taught me the value of working hard and doing your best even when the work was unpleasant, and about fulfilling your responsibilities even when doing so was inconvenient. She taught me to marry passion with reason, to not get overly excited when life was going well, and to not get too down when it went badly. All this was instilled in me by an elderly, plainspoken white lady from Kansas. It was her perspective that often came to mind when I was campaigning, and her worldview that I sensed in many of the voters I encountered, whether in rural Iowa or in a Black neighborhood in Chicago, that same quiet pride in sacrifices made for children and grandchildren, the same lack of pretension, the same modesty of expectations.