Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 66

HE WAS INTELLIGENT, CLEVER AND TOTALLY COMPOSED. I KNOW I’M ONLY 22, BUT I STILL REMEMBER WELL WHEN OUR PRESIDENT WASN’T ANY OF THOSE THINGS.  my support, you ought to do it by appealing to my sentiments on issues that I care about,” he says. “I think he’ll be hard pressed to win the state.” Yet when Obama came to Chapel Hill in late April, joining the comedian and television host Jimmy Fallon for a taping of his show, Terrell went for a look. There was the president, comfortably hanging out as Fallon displayed a picture of him when he was a student at Occidental College. They joked about his Afro and a jacket Obama said he bought at the Goodwill. Fallon noted the couch covered with a sheet, and the dying spider plant in the corner. Obama talked about the milk crates that must have been there. Then Obama shifted into serious mode, discussing the need to make college more affordable, while working his own family into the conversation — some- — Joseph Terrell thing every politician tries to do, but rarely as naturally. “We didn’t finish paying off all our student loans until about eight years ago,” Obama said, drawing a gasp from Fallon. He noted his fight with Congress over the looming increase of interest rates on student loans. None of this changed Terrell’s intellectual assessment of Obama. But it tapped into something visceral — the thing that Obama is going to need a lot of. “He was intelligent, clever and totally composed,” Terrell says. “I know I’m only 22, but I still remember well when our president wasn’t any of those things. I left thinking, ‘Man, it’s just so cool that this guy’s the president.’ He’s all the things I would want in a president. He hasn’t done all the things I would like him to do, but he still is that person.”