Destiny Calling

On a bitter cold day in 2007—nearly 150 years after Abraham Lincoln's inauguration—United States Senator Barack Obama of Illinois gathered his supporters at the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Very new to the national political arena, he made an audacious announcement: "If you feel destiny calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching before us; if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on t