Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2009 > January > 20
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Obama speech challenged America
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In his historic campaign for president, Barack Obama talked often of the need for change both in Washington and in the country at large. In a time of national doubt and uncertainty, that message clearly resonated with the American people.
Yet in Obama’s much-anticipated inaugural address Tuesday, the new president spoke less about change than about a recommitment to old-fashioned values and responsibility. It is time, he suggested, to once again take up what he called “the price and promise of citizenship.”
Yes, he acknowledged, we face difficult times:
“Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”
Yet as he reminded the American people, we have seen tougher times than these and emerged stronger from the challenge. He summoned the collective memories of Valley Forge, where “snow was stained with blood,” of the struggles against fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War.
And how did our forefathers wring success from such crisis?
They did it because earlier generations “struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life,” Obama said. They succeeded “not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.”
“Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations,” Obama reminded his fellow Americans. “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”
Some saw those and other words as a rebuke to Obama’s predecessor, but that’s unlikely. Whatever his failings, Obama has always had a feel for the big moment, and he would not waste this one on so petty a message. Instead, when he invoked scripture, noting that “the time has come to set aside childish things,” he was chiding Americans of all political parties and persuasions, its leaders as well as its people.
“… our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed,” he said.
In his campaign, Obama also spoke often about audacity, and there was something deeply audacious in this speech. Leaders rarely have the courage to challenge and criticize even implicitly those who elected them. The safer course, the more politic course, is to promise to protect voters from sacrifice and to reassure them that responsibility for their problems belongs elsewhere.
Obama has taken the road less traveled. If we are to solve the problems that confront us, we the people will have to do it. We the people have to acknowledge what it had become fashionable to deny, that all Americans “have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly.”
“Our challenges may be new,” he said. “The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old.”
The years ahead will test whether Obama is willing to match that audacious rhetoric with audacious action; more importantly, they will test whether “we the people” are worthy of what others have handed down to us.
Permalink | Comments (122) | Post your comment |
President Barack Hussein Obama …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I like that he didn’t shy from “Hussein” in taking the oath.
The inaugural address was tough-minded and sober, I thought, and it succeeded in placing these difficult days in historic context. Other generations of Americans have risen to the challenge; we will too. He called upon the best of this country.
The language about staying true to our principles and values, of not sacrificing liberty in exchange for security and expediency, was particularly strong. Overall, it did not rise to the level of eloquence that Obama has displayed in the past, but I suspect that was a conscious decision on his part. He left the poetry to the poet; this was about governing, and about the difficult decisions ahead.
Permalink | Comments (125) | Post your comment |
After two thousand, nine hundred and twenty two days …
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
a new president is about to take the reins of power.
The American people certainly understand the gravity of the problems facing President-elect Barack Obama, both here and abroad; few presidents have come into office under more difficult circumstances. But polls also suggest that Americans have confidence in their new leadership to handle those problems — for example, more than two-thirds believe that Obama will be a good or great president, and a similar number tell pollsters that they are very or somewhat optimistic “that the new Obama administration will be able to improve the way things are going in this country.”
That’s important. Confidence in leadership can go a long way, especially on the economic front, and we’ve been missing that for some time now. It also suggests that Obama will be able to bring others to his side to push in the direction he sets.
In fact, Barton Gellman, writing in the Washington Post, lays out the case that under the circumstances, Obama could become one of the the most powerful and important presidents in history:
“The opportunity is there for Obama to recast the very nature of the presidency,” said Sean Wilentz, a presidential historian at Princeton. “Not since Reagan have we had as capable a persuader as Obama, and not since FDR has a president come in with quite the configuration of foreign and domestic crises that open up such a possibility for the reconstruction of the executive.”
No president has begun his term with so broad a wave of public confidence — 78 percent approval in the most recent Gallup poll. There are precedents for single-party control of the White House and Congress, but the early signs suggest that House and Senate Democrats will be far more united in loyalty to Obama than their counterparts were to President Jimmy Carter. The Republican opposition, by contrast, appears to be as fractured as at any time since Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964. If Obama keeps the loyalty of the online social networks he used to win election, with unprecedented success in fundraising and recruiting, his White House could be the first to harness a meaningful grass-roots movement as an ongoing tool of governance.
The federal government itself is a far more potent instrument, in its breadth and depth of command over national life, than it has ever been before. Largely in response to the threat of terrorism, the Bush years and President Bill Clinton’s two terms saw “an incredible period of state-building that’s unrivaled in American history except by the creation of the national security state in the 1940s and ’50s,” said Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law at Yale whose blog, Balkinization, is often cited by members of the Obama team.”
…….
Today, history of one sort will be made when Obama becomes the first African-American inaugurated as president. But history of the more important sort will be made in the many days that will follow, in days that will determine the course of this country and the world.
UPDATE:
My older daughter — memorably referred to once as “Bookman’s demon spawn” by one of our conservative posters — drove up to Washington for the event and files this on-the-scene report (liveblogging!):
“We’re standing in front of the Washington Monument and the Capitol is hazy in the distance but the crowd extends for miles. It’s certainly the most diverse event I’ve ever seen and there are still hours until anything starts. Its so cold that I can’t type much more but it’s really great to be here.”
