The Change express

Obama and his team seem to always be riding perilously close to the edge of over-reach and sentimentality. Yesterday's train trip, from Philly to Washington DC, evoking Lincoln's in 1860 1861, was surely the latest example.

But as he and Michelle waded into the crowds that had assembled and waited for hours in Baltimore, with temperatures hovering in the teens, the look of comfortable pleasure on the soon to be First Couple's faces, and the look of tearful, unalloyed joy on the faces of those who had a chance in a lifetime to touch the Obamas and to get a closeup digital photo, was about as moving as anything I'd ever seen relating to presidential politics.

Ironically, Lincoln had to pass through Baltimore through cover of darkness in 1860 1861. Maryland was a slave state and Baltimore sided with the Confederacy.