It's not really even a good opportunity for dancing in the streets because one more powerful person has come tumbling down. After all, some powerful people are better than others, and when powerful people fall from the mighty, naughty force of their appetites, nothing about power is changed at all--quite the contrary. The law, the family, marriage--exit polls suggest that all of these will be the winner here, after being horribly maligned by a man who forgot his oaths to honor them.Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there's a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. 

It is true that some liberal scholars like me, having studied the text and history closely, have concluded, against our political instincts, that the Second Amendment protects more than a collective right to own and use guns in the service of state militias and national guard units. Opponents of the District’s flat ban on handgun possession have cited my words to the court and in newspaper editorials in their support.

But nothing I have discovered or written supports an absolute right to possess the weapons of one’s choice. The lower court’s decision in this case -- the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found the District’s ban on concealable handguns in a densely populated area to be unconstitutional -- went overboard. Under any plausible standard of review, a legislature’s choice to limit the citizenry to rifles, shotguns and other weapons less likely to augment urban violence need not, and should not, be viewed as an unconstitutional abridgment of the right of the people to keep or bear arms.

It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.

And it was a reflection of faith -- deep, hopeful, transcending faith in the promises of the Gospels. And it was about America -- its unique promise, its historic purpose, and our duty to take up the burden to perfect this union -- today, in our time, in our way.

Bill Clinton once said that everything bad in America can be rectified by what is good in America. He was right - and Obama takes that to a new level. And does it with the deepest darkest wound in this country's history.

Maybe it is not so mysterious, though, that the Bush administration could simultaneously scold defaulting homeowners for the sin of striving to join the "ownership society" promoted so vigorously by the president until recently, while reversing course to drop all pretense of personal responsibility when a large financial house is at the brink. It seems to be all a question of vision, of who matters in the end in the priorities of an ideology-driven White House.