The Eternal Sunshining of the Obama Mind

Nine days after a gunman killed nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then-President Barack Obama spoke at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, senior pastor at the church and a former member of the South Carolina state senate. (He had spent the last day of his life campaigning with Hillary Clinton.) The President was mournful, as stricken as the rest of the country, when he suddenly did something amazing: He began to sing.

It’s remarkable to watch. To see him hesitate, not certain he should really go for it, aware of how wrong it could go — the most powerful man in the world looking … nervous? And then he takes the plunge, and that week of grief found its catharsis. It was a profoundly moving moment. It was one of the most incredible things I’d ever seen a president do.

The Way I See It, a new documentary about White House photographer-turned-anti-Trump activist Pete Souza, features this moment prominently, and contrasts it, as Souza himself has consistently done both on social media and in his book Shade: A Tale of Two…