I’ve got to say I really do hope Mr Obama will stick around in some sort of significant fashion, if only for his most excellent speechifying.
On his recent speech (in his own words, not ghostwritten) on racism in the USA, some NYTimes commentators said:
Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights activist, said the speech moved him to tears. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, said he believed the speech would “go down as one of the great, magnificent and moving speeches in the American political tradition.”
Me, I wasn’t moved to tears, but the daring and intelligence and even-handedness of this 5000-word speech impressed the hell out of me. You can also learn a lot from it, so I really recommend it as background reading. The background to the story is that his campaign was confronted with some video clips taken from sermons of Obama’s church’s minister, Jeremiah Wright, in which the latter said some pretty controversial things about the USA. Go and have a look. It’s very educational*.
Anyway, that’s one wonderful speech. Please make time for it. You are bound to be a wiser, kinder and more knowledgeable person afterwards. 
*In fact, I defy you not to hear in Reverend Wright’s ranting a lot of the sentiments that are quite common here in Europe.
