Video of Tearful Obama Is Awesome

A video now making the rounds shows President Obama shedding tears as he thanks young staffers in Chicago. Cynics are already having a field day, but Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon thinks the clip will resonate among the president's supporters because it's "an affirmation of exactly who we were voting for on Tuesday," she writes. "It’s a video of a leader with a heart." The genuine, raw emotion is "stunningly unique," Williams adds. Other presidents have gotten misty-eyed, but none has shown this "unabashed emotion." Read her full piece here.

A snippet of what the president was saying, from the Washington Post:

• “It’s not that you remind me of myself; it’s that you’re so much better than I was. You’re smarter and you’re better organized and you’re more effective. What Bobby Kennedy called the ‘ripples of hope,’ when you throw a stone in the lake, that’s you.”

(More Obama 2012 stories.)