Journalists suffering from Obama withdrawal clearly were happy to see former President Barack Obama back in the limelight Monday.

A subdued Obama held court with high school and college students during an event at the University of Chicago. He reminisced about his time as a community organizer in Chicago after graduating from college and talked about the importance of grooming the next generation of leaders.

“We sort of saw Obama [the] educator, the professor, and also the community organizer.”

“It was a little over 30 years ago that I came to Chicago,” Obama said. “I was 25 years old and I had gotten out of college filled with idealism and absolutely certain that somehow I was going to change the world. But I had no idea how or where or what I was going to be doing.”

A Democratic base so filled with rage that the party chairman has taken to literally cursing in public likely wished Obama would have taken on President Donald Trump. But it was still music to the ears of liberal pundits and TV journalists.

“We sort of saw Obama [the] educator, the professor, and also the community organizer,” said MSNBC anchor Kristen Welker.

Washington Post editorial board member Jonathan Capehart gushed over Obama’s performance, tying it to his earliest speeches as a national figure.

“The man that we were watching on the screen is the man that we have seen when he burst on to the scene in 2004 with that keynote [speech] for the then-Democratic nominee, John Kerry,” he said. “What we’ve seen since he’s left office is Democrats, and just Americans in general, have moved through the shock of the election and the surprise of the election and some of the hurt and pain of the election to the action after the election.”

NBC News reporter Ron Allen, who covered the event, gave voice to the frustration of some progressive activists.

“A lot of supporters of President Obama, a lot of Democrats out there, want him to play a more vocal role in the current debate,” he said. “And he clearly says that he is not going to do that. He’s going to pick his moments … But given the fact that President Trump is trying to dismantle so many things that President Obama holds dear to his heart, it seems inevitable that he is going to, that President Trump is going to cross some of these lines that President Obama has laid out.”

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On Twitter, journalists and activists were praising Obama before he even took the stage.

“Tomorrow we will get our first glimpse of a real POTUS since Jan 20th as Obama will be in Chicago making his first post-presidential speech,” writer and activist David Yankovich tweeted on Sunday.

CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza contrasted Obama’s event with an imaginary one involving Trump.

“Try to imagine Donald Trump holding an event like the one Obama is doing,” he tweeted. “Massive difference in approach to public life.”

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Tweeted MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid: “It’s so strange watching and listening to President Obama right now. It feels like ages ago that this sense of calm I feel was mundane.”

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