… Powell said that Obama had run a completely new kind of campaign when it came to race. “Shirley [Chisholm] was a wonderful woman, and I admire Jesse [Jackson] and all of my other friends in the black community,” he said, “but I think Obama should not be just—well, ‘They were black, and he’s black, therefore they’re his predecessor.’ “Here’s the difference in a nutshell, and it’s an expression that I’ve used throughout my career—first black national-security adviser, first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, first black Secretary of State. What Obama did, he’s run as an American who is black, not as a black American. There’s a difference. People would say to me, ‘Gee, it’s great to be the black Secretary of State,’ and I would blink and laugh and say, ‘Is there a white one somewhere? I am the Secretary of State, who happens to be black.’ Make sure you understand where you put that descriptor, because it makes a difference. … Having cast himself in Selma twenty months ago as one who stood on the “shoulders of giants,” as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and pushed it into the background. “Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time.