Now there remains only the occasion of Obama's Inaugural Address before he will put to the test his capacity to reconcile forces and historical actors far beyond his experiences in Cambridge, Hyde Park, Capitol Hill, and Oahu.
This is often our only way of reconciling the force of attraction between these two.
A sense of the double self, and the difficulties of reconciling opposing forces, pervades the evening.
Like F.D.R., he dominated an era by reconciling opposites through force of personality: just as Roosevelt the patrician became the tribune of the people, Reagan turned conservatism into a forward-looking, optimistic ideology.
Today, Iran's Islamic Republic endures only because it has adapted, because it has tolerated and even encouraged experimentation that seeks to reconcile the forces of Islam and some degree of democracy.
But some societies have done a better job than others of reconciling the conflicting forces.
Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling Iraq's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — all were benchmarks, and all remain partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed to create the space for political progress and thus peace.
Long sections of Schroder's confession are addressed to his traumatized wife, with whom he still imagines reconciling, notwithstanding his recent, forced admission that even her own last name is a lie.
The trial may be gaining wider interest because it follows a familiar New Jersey story line -- another town forced toward reconciling a clouded industrial past with questions about present-day public health.
The 21st century will be about reconciling global and local forces.
