Obama built his speech around the question a kindergartener had asked him in a letter: 'Are people being nice?' He used that innocent question to examine the state of American political discourse, tracing the history of nasty politics all the way back to Thomas Jefferson being accused of promoting murder and incest. But despite two centuries of fierce conflict, the experiment in democracy had survived — through revolution, civil war, depression, and world war. The nation's destiny had never been certain, Obama said, but what had always been certain was the American capacity to shape it. That ability to look past differences and still forge a common future was, in his view, the defining quality of the American experiment.