Noam Scheiber reminisces:

This, in turn, prompted me to recall how much of a non-celebrity Obama was when I met him four-and-a-half years ago. I distinctly remember trailing him around some cloak room or caucus room in the Illinois state senate in April of 2004. This attracted a lot of attention from his colleagues, and one of them–a middle-aged white woman, if I remember correctly–finally asked who I was. “He’s from The New Republic,” Obama told her. I might have imagined it, but I got the impression people were pretty impressed.

I met Obama on line for a breakfast buffet at a hotel somewhere in downtown Boston at the 2004 convention. As I recall, we were both going for some bacon. He wasn’t so staffed up at that point. When he said he was Barack Obama, I knew who he was, but at that point he wasn’t so famous that I just recognized him off the bat or anything. It must have been a day or two later when I was inside the Fleet Center and randomly ran into a guy I knew who, unbeknownst to me, had moved to Illinois to work for Ron Blagojevic (this was back when Blago was a progressive rising star) and he told me that I just had to get into the arena to hear this guy Barack Obama speak. He told me it was going to be something else.

And you know what? It was.

And I suppose this is petty of me, but as we await tomorrow’s historic occasion in some ways I can’t help but feel that that night four and a half years ago was the real deal—not what’s going to happen tomorrow. Real history has that spontaneous quality. Before Obama spoke, a minority of people knew that he was a brilliant orator, and absolutely nobody knew that he was about to launch an incredibly sudden rise from the State Senate to the White House. But it happened. And though of course the full import of those events couldn’t be known until Election Day 2008, people who saw the speech immediately knew that something surprising and important had happened.

It’s very strange to have these bands of National Guard soldiers roaming around town. What’s especially odd is that they seem to be mostly roaming fairly aimlessly—I saw four soldiers walking on south on 4th Street between L & K carrying a 12-pack of Mountain Dew. And they’re everywhere—it’s not as if there are any high-value targets in Bloomingdale, just a cool café and a somewhat odd organic bodega.

UPDATE: Also note that it’s not just the DC National Guard, they’ve shipped National Guardsmen in from other states under some kind of federal control deal.

The economy’s getting so bad that the Wholesale Liquidators store in Eden Center is going out of business?

Meanwhile, last time I went to Hong Kong Palace it was incredibly crowded, so I think Tyler Cowen should stop recommending excellent, obscure dining spots. I remember the Jackson Diner in Queens before word got so far out (circa 1997?) and it moved to its new location with higher prices and worse food. So let me say here, do not go to Eden Center and eat the Vietnamese food there—now that the wholesale liquidators store is going out of business there is absolutely no reason to visit that particular strip mall. And stay out of Thai Xing on Florida Avenue in the city, too.

In my inbox:

Because the Presidential Transition office will be closing before our press department has access to email addresses in the White House, we ask for your patience as there will be a period of time tomorrow when it will be a bit more difficult to receive information and to contact us. To that end, we have created interim email addresses where you will be able to email us, which can be found below. Any message sent to these accounts could be forwarded to White House accounts and subject to the Presidential Records Act.

As we will not be able to send out press releases starting tomorrow afternoon, please watch www.whitehouse.gov for pool reports and new information.

Temporary Email Addresses:

A list of special gmail addresses for various communications staff follows, but I’m not going to print that.