The Courtier Chronicles

It's been difficult, it really has, but THE SCRAPBOOK has read every last bit of triumphalist commentary on Barack Obama's election. The International Code of Punditry compels us. Some of the analysis, we are happy to report, has been sober and thought-provoking. And there's no doubt that the election of America's first black president is a historic milestone.

But most of the punditry has been--and we say this with as much understatement as we can muster--a bunch of bull. So we've been keeping a file of the over-the-top reactions to The One's ascendance. Here are some of the worst. Be prepared to gag.

"Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. Barack Obama never talks about how people see him: I'm not the one making history, he said every chance he got. You are. Yet as he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people's faces. We are the ones we've been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began. .  .  .

"Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken

--Time editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs in that magazine's November 17 issue.

"Yes, it is time to hope again.

"Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between 'values voters' and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician.

"Above all, it is time to celebrate the country's wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation. For years, we have spoken of bringing free elections to the rest of the world even as we cynically mocked our own ways of conducting politics. Yesterday, we chose to practice what we have been preaching."

--Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., November 5

"We will have a President who can think and feel and speak; we will have a grownup who will treat us like grownups. The Bush era is over. And the Clinton era. And the Reagan era. And the 1960s."

--New Yorker staff writer George Packer, on his blog, November 5

Those are the more cringe-worthy reactions. Other Obama supporters were simply indecipherable.

"Youths literally run the world. Kids probably have the loudest voice together than anyone."

--actress Hayden Panetierre, quoted in the October 27 Washington Post.