Sarvis:

Here's the One Big Thing he did: he changed the tone.

He scaled down the rhetoric. He dialed back the race to the anhiliation of everyone. He softened the atmosphere of us-and-them and to-hell-with-everyone. He restored validity to the idea of negotiating your way through conflicts. He paused to let other people talk. He threw some cold water on the open endorsement of torture. He stopped calling our enemies and allies stupid childish names and cheap insults. He returned to the notion of the judicious use of force. He used the word "humility" without spitting. He eased the practice of unilateralism as a default mode. He took the boiling pot of the midle east off the bonfire and put it instead back on a hot plate, at least rhetorically. He did not leer at Muslims with an openly evangelical and crusading Christianity. He did not glare at other nations who dared to articulate and pursue their own self interests. He did not berate anyone who fell out of lock step agreement with him as enemies of liberty and lovers of terrorism. He presided over several simultaneous national and global crisies without resorting to an insistence that the crisises gave him license to do whatever he wanted to whoever he wanted whenever he wanted. He did not issue a proclamation of security that claimed the prerogative to preemptively make war wherever and whenever he pleased for whatever reason he secretly claimed. He steered the ship of state away from its Thelma and Louise acceleration towards a precipice of violence and militarism.

In short, rhetorically, he is the anti-Bush. And for that, the world cheered, and the vector of our momentum eased back, if only slightly, away from the direction of endless war.

Now then, this may all be just words. And while this concept may come as a shock to people who have become entangled in the anti-meaning nihilism of Fox News and Rush O'Reilly -- when you are the President of the United States, words matter.

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Ditto!
Thank you for writing this!

And, . . . "the anti-Bush" LOL. Very good, I like that. I might have to quote you on this one. As a matter of fact I bet it becomes collectively popular.