“People are always asking me, ‘Why, with these fancy degrees and a professorship, would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?’ ” Barack Obama said when campaigning for the U.S. Senate in 2004, according to a profile in the New Yorker. “And my answer is ‘We’ve got too much cynicism in this country, and we’re all in this together, and government expresses that.’ ”

If there’s one theme that defined Obama’s meteoric rise from the state Senate to the White House, it was his war on cynicism.