From a McClatchy story from yesterday afternoon, long before Hillary Clinton’s “unexpected” win in the New Hampshire primary:

Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, a New Hampshire resident who’s endorsed Obama, said in an interview the day before the primary…that, if elected, Obama had the potential to be a Lincoln or a Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“He is the embodiment of our wish for ourselves, his ability to transcend the same-old same-old,” Burns said. “He’s a wonderful messenger who carries a complicated message to the rest of us of what we want to be . . . of a whole legacy of promise.”

I’m still trying to work out what it actually means for a messenger to carry me a message of who I want to be, but I do know that Burns has a thing about “transcendent presidents”––that’s the phrase used to describe Lincoln in the official synopsis of The Civil War.