At camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on a balmy spring day to see the end of the Iraq war.
Frankly, it ended with a bit of a whimper.
The marines in this huge place - the biggest on America's east coast - were subdued but not upset about getting out of Iraq. The president was forceful - he keeps using the phrase "let me be clear" as if he is worrying that people are not concentrating properly - and the mission is over or at least has a firm end-date.
We are told that Mr Obama called George W Bush seconds before the speech - as a courtesy.
I asked Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, whether he could look the outside world in the eye and say "America won!" Not a useful term, he said. Indeed.
I also asked him whether the president now accepted that the surge (which he opposed) led at least to this calm period in which an orderly withdrawal can be contemplated.
That he dodged: "You'll have to ask him!"
It is a big day anyway, not in truth a winning or losing day, but a day that history will mark as significant.
UPDATE: Take a look at my quick word with Defence Secretary Robert Gates:
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Among other issues arising from the president's speech to Congress: he made two extravagant claims.
First, he suggested that there was no greater power in the world than the example of America, and secondly he said America invented the car.
You can make a decent argument for the first of these claims being true. As I say in my book on anti-Americanism, nobody really wants to be Chinese, or British, or Greek, or Saudi, who is not already. Millions are desperate to be American. There is a space in our minds where America can fit.
But the car claim is false and suggests that this White House is as prone as previous White Houses to that American vice of assuming airily that the achievements of the outside world are not worthy of taking seriously, of internalising, in the way humble foreigners internalise American achievements and prowess.
The real story of last night was that the revelation that the Republicans are still without a decent candidate for 2012. Bobby Jindal was widely thought to have been awful - he certainly looked like a minor figure compared with the president.
Partly that is the result of the setting - President Obama gets Congress and Mr Jindal gets a flat TV backdrop - but there was more as well, as unkindreviewershave been queuing up to point out.
The terrorists - in Obamaland - are lumped in with other problems the world faces: global warming, disease, etc.
The war IS over it seems to me, listening to him speak. Not the fight, but the war.
The enemy was not raised onto a pedestal in this speech, to be taunted and threatened. The enemy was mentioned almost casually - among other priorities. Mr Obama said he would not let them sit and plot against America. Is he right? Or is Dick Cheney?
If he had messed up as his successor did and started his speech too soon (not waiting for Speaker Pelosi to bring Congress to order) or indeed committed all the other minor infractions that Mr Obama regularly does, it would have been put down to his ineptness.
With Mr Obama it does not work.
He just looks as if he is a young fellow held back by foolish folderol. Style is so important - Bush's stiffness made him look as if he was messing up.
Mr Obama is languid enough to fall over and still look fine. Only one slightly off note - Nancy Pelosi. She looks too pleased with herself, too pleased with him.
So he wants time. That is the central message of the Canada visit. Mr Obama will not be rushed into confrontation of even the mildest kind.
He leapt down the steps of Air Force One like a game-show host - and comported himself during his six hours north of the border as if the whole shebang could end with everyone taking home all the prizes.
Canada intends to pull its troops out of Afghanistan. Fine, let's talk about something else: how wonderful they have been, or how nice it would be if the fighting could be augmented by diplomacy and aid.
Canada objects to the president's desire to re-negotiate the NAFTA deal. Fine, let's talk about how important free trade is while still (apparently) toying with the idea of changing the deal in the future.
Perhaps this relationship-building is a necessary part of leading the US in the post-Bush world, but I do wonder whether foreign leaders are going to get a real sense of what Obama stands for. They may be tempted to take liberties. Will he take off his shoe and bang the table at the NATO summit in France in April?
After all you don't need to be John Bolton or Karl Rove to accept that there will be limits to the president's room for compromise and amiable discourse in the future. Even as he arrives back in Washington, the storm clouds gather.
Having said that, the waitress was wearing an Obama T-shirt when I had my fish and chips in Ottawa tonight. His approval ratings here are at 80%. Canadian television treated him with the respect they would normally reserve for the Pope. This can be bottled and used. It is the epitome of soft power.
One of the oddities of the Obama/Canada relationship is that he is so far to the left of Stephen Harper's conservative government. As this piece makes clear the Canadian people are probably on board for dramatic action on climate change but the Canadian government tends to take the same view as the Bush administration did - that these measures might damage the economy.
Boy, Canadians know the meaning of stoicism. Standing with the small multi-ethnic crowd outside the parliament building here in Ottowa - comprised mainly of the young and the old, the middle aged presumably at work - we witnessed the mounting expectation as the choppers circled and The Moment arrived. And then it was over. Barack Obama's arrival last a few seconds and was mainly blocked by ambulances parked unhelpfully between the president and the crowd.
He did manage to get round them and get a wave in, but he was probably wise to stay well back. Security consisted of a very nice Canadian policewoman asking people in the queue whether they had anything in their pockets. I think they looked in bags as well but there were no metal detectors, no dogs. And no close view of the president.
The biggest stir was caused by people trying to get close to the Canadian TV reporters who - I note with some envy - appear to be treated as real celebrities in their own right. The Canadian TV coverage is relentlessly, breathlessly, positive. But on Afghanistan there is a real difference of emphasis to put it mildly: Obama is reinforcing and Canada is preparing to pull out.
So the annoucements to thrill Canadian TV will be on environmental stuff and soothing commitments to free but fair trade. He will charm everyone and be back in Washington for dinner. And it seems even on the plane he has an ability to make friends.
Obama goes north for his first foreign visit this week and I go with him.
As the creationists leave America for more congenial foreign countries (joke!) I see the scientists north of the border are already thinking of taking their places in the Cincinnati suburbs...
The Obama visit is oddly short - six hours in Canada. I suspect he thought it was on the way back from Phoenix to DC and has only just seen the map. If millions of Canadians freeze trying to catch a glimpse of him this could turn out to be a disaster...
I was personally delighted by the health spending contained in the stimulus bill as it will probably increase funds spent on combatting the disease my son has and I am sure there are others with the same priorities or different ones who are equally pleased or disappointed.
But the Republicans have a point do they not? If you are going to fund diabetes research, why not just do it? You can make a long-term case for American medical leadership being good for the American economy but will it kick start spending and hiring in the short term? I am torn: I am glad the money is being spent but I am not sure I fully grasp the economics behind it...
I am writing this in conservative Utah, where Darwin Day passed rather quietly. But Utah is not alone.
To many of America's friends abroad, this odd refusal to come to terms with the theory of evolution is one of those cultural dividing lines that causes suspicion: what can the Americans be thinking? Why are they so strange? It's in the same box as America's enthusiasm for executions and its penchant for guns.
But I have always thought the creationist America line rather over-done by foreign news organisations looking for stories. The truth is that most educated Americans accept evolution or do not have a view.
In a nation where people are free to organise and raise their voices there is, though, a lot of sound and fury on the creationist front - and probably around a quarter of Americans, mostly southerners, are creationists.
They are not in the driving seat in Obama's America (actually they were not in Bush's either) and nor - as this wise piece makes clear - do they feel themselves to be in the driving seat.
The Creation Museum in Kentucky (I visited it when it opened) does not exactly threaten the scientific world with the cogency of its thought. Creationism is a strand of American thinking, but it does not define the nation.
It all boils down to this: will the stimulus package for the US economy (and the re-vamped bank bail-out) actually have the desired effect.
Anyone who has studied even undergraduate economics knows that just as stock markets tend to leap forward early in a recovery, unemployment tends to lag behind the curve as firms wait to make sure the green shoots are really green and really shooting.
So the employment promise contained in the Obama plan is very ambitious. There is room for disappointment. But there is a deeper problem: the real scepticism in the US is focused on the economic institutions themselves - government and private - and whether they can make a better job of things in the future.
This impassioned piece has a direct relevance to the US experience where the Republicans say that only the individual taxpayer can be trusted to reboot the economy. He/She should get the money. It could still become plan B.
Joe Biden was regarded with some affection by the media during the election campaign and you can see why: he is wonderfully prone to create little frissons of fun at the edges of whatever enterprise he is embarked upon.
He was fabulously well-behaved in the event and provided almost no copy for anyone, but the risk the Obama team took by picking him, and their frustration with him now, is openly available for all to see. I thought this answer did not quite merit the headline here but it was pretty cutting.
At the moment the replaying of the "gaffe" and the (false) suggestion that it referred to the stimulus plan don't really play because everyone's minds are on more serious stuff but in a year, two years, four?
You are all wrong about Daschle! He was irreplaceable. Not because of his personal talents or lack of them, not even because of his smart glasses.
He was Health's Barack Obama. He could do business with the business end of the industry (as some of you pointed out) and business as well with the politicians, in particular with the Democrats who might now want to trumpet their own reforms. He gave everyone a stake in change.
There is no-one else who can do this. Literally no-one. (Howard Dean? Marygrav - the good doctor would get nowhere.) De Gaulle was right (cemeteries and irreplaceable men) but he would have made an exception for Tom Daschle. And it is fascinating that Obama held on to him for reasons eerily similar to the reasons Bush held onto any number of pals he arguably should have jettisoned as this piece suggests.
Well, anyway ....
On the eve of Another Big Week for Obama (and the world economy) there is wise advice from the Midwest.
And if the supporter is right that Mr Daschle was irreplaceable, then the administration has taken a big, big hit, to an extent un-noticed because of the many other things going on. It is genuinely possible that health reform went down the Swannee with Mr Daschle.
And there is no doubt now that life has become permanently trickier for the 44th president.
You see it at the press briefing, where the amiable Robert Gibbs is under increasing pressure, and you see it with the stimulus bill, which may or may not be approved in the Senate within hours: what is fascinating is that opponents are not being cowed even by this president in his pomp.
On Daschlegate, the real scandal is the tax code, stupid. The US system is foolishly complex. The land of the free is, paradoxically, the land of almost obessive inefficient form-filling bureaucracy. India could not do better.
If you read only one piece on the subject let it be this.
The big story is not tax though, it is health. The last three paragraphs of this piece suggest a whole lot of pain for the White House which Mr Daschle, uniquely, could have avoided.
But is he quite the moderate that he appears to be? It seems to me that on one social issue, stem cell research, he could be completely outside the mainstream - every bit as much as, say, Sarah Palin probably is.
This piece rightly focuses on an apology he had to give to Jewish-Americans, but his lack of thoughtfulness about stem cell research is mind boggling to millions of people whose relatives stand to benefit from this area of medicine (I am one - with my son's juvenile diabetes).
I remember a wise person during the Terri Schiavo affair suggested that Americans tended to throw off some of their moral caution when the social issue at hand might affect them or their loved ones.
In that case it was the right to die - in the case of stem cells, it is the chances of frightening diseases, even paralysis, being tackled.
If this wonderful chap could show some further progress over the next four or eight years, no Republican standing "against" stem cell research could win the presidency.
Much of what the Obama adminstration does a future Republican administration will undo: stem cell research is not such an issue. If it works, as with so much else in this nation, it will be enthusiastically adopted.
Of course a fair minded person would acknowledge that some of the research being conducted has NOT been hampered by the Bush restrictions (researchers used adult stem cells or those already in existence when the bans arrived) and that the whole field is still open to question as here. But I still don't see the clock going back on this one - not in America.
Church rift flares after gay vote A US diocese elects only the second openly gay bishop in the global Anglican Church, reigniting a hugely divisive issue.
No Bin Laden reports 'in years' Defence Secretary Robert Gates admits the US has had no reliable information on Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts "in years".
Thousands attend Jara's reburial Thousands attend the funeral of Chilean singer Victor Jara, who has been reburied 36 years after being killed following a coup.
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