After a long day on Capitol Hill, they walked west along the Mall, then circled around to Pennsylvania Avenue and paused in front of the White House. Beyond the fence, past the north-west gate, Ronald Reagan lives, the 40th president of the United States.
An ambitious thoughts of a young traveler goes along with him until in the year 1984, studied inwardly as he once described as a "knotted, howling assertion of self". At the age of 22, he was emerging from his lonely years in New York, the period in his memoir, Dreams from my Father.
He had not figured out his life until one day, he enters the White House to live and work as Preident Obama.
For him, this is no improbability when you have that ambition even becoming a President. From Lincoln to Truman, to Truman to Clinton, the cast of Amercian presidency came out of nowhere with no connections and as conspicuous the well-born lineage of Adams and Roosevelt including Bush.
There were even some intimations of fame, real or imagined, along the way with Obama, dating to his toddler days in Honolulu when his grandfather told camera-toting tourists that the chubby, tanned little boy at his side was the progeny of a great Hawaiian king. In later years, men of a more serious mien, from the constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe at Harvard to the federal judge Abner Mikva in Chicago, were sufficiently impressed to proclaim that young Obama had the wherewithal to become the first black president.