Sometimes change tiptoes up and surprises you. There could be no better illustration of America’s dramatic week than the White House lit up in rainbow colours as the confederate flag was lowered in the south. There was no starker moment than President Barack Obama urging the Christian doctrine of grace on the bible belt in the town where the first shot of the civil war was fired. Last week reality put the most far-fetched episode of West Wing into the shade — and there is probably more to come. Is Mr Obama finally ushering in the change he promised?

The optics certainly favour that view. A week ago Mr Obama faced the spectre of his signature healthcare bill unravelling in the Supreme Court and the defeat of his big trade agenda in the Pacific and the Atlantic. In either case, his presidency would have turned rapidly lame duck. But a week is a long time in politics, as they say. Both disasters were averted — one by a conservative-majority Supreme Court, the other at the hands of a Republican Congress. Events peaked with what Mr Obama described as the legal “thunderbolt” that put same sex marriage on an equal footing across all 50 states.

Then came his eulogy to Clementa Pinckney, the pastor slain the previous week by a white supremacist along with eight of his congregation. With a force no other president could have summoned, Mr Obama drew on the revivalist oratory of black church tradition to shame the culture of hatred that led to the massacre. Even by Mr Obama’s standards, it was a striking performance that combined a repudiation of the south’s racist history with a rallying cry to a new era of social justice. Those who saw it could sense the “arc of history” bending in Mr Obama’s direction and the fierce relevance of his story. Mr Obama went to Charleston to speak at a funeral. He left at the emotional pinnacle of his presidency.