BASKING IN INAUGURATION POMP AND CEREMONY
Second time a charm
U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama walk the route as the inaugural parade winds through Washington yesterday. Obama used his address to challenge Americans to rise above their political differences.
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama was inaugurated for a second term as the 44th president of the United States at noon Monday and told Americans they have a duty to protect the country’s freedom and extend its principles around the world. He then called on them to unite under “the star that guides us still,” which is that “all of us are created equal.”
With equality as his guiding theme, Obama used his 19-minute inaugural address to challenge Americans to rise above their political differences as they continue along the path toward a time when the poorest of U.S. citizens have an equal opportunity to achieve their dreams, exercise their talents and succeed in life.
He said Americans are only true to their creed when “a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American. She is free. She is equal, not just in the eyes of God but in our own.”
In a country where 22 per cent of children live below the poverty line, these words drew great applause.
“What binds this nation together is not the colours of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names,” he said. “What makes us exceptional, what makes us American is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration two centuries ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.’ ”
His speech was, at times, professorial and at times assertive. He did not shy away from restating his principles and the goals of his administration as he outlined the issues that he claims will dominate his administration over the next four years.
The president said the United States must work to raise its people out of poverty and strengthen the middle class to assure that all Americans have an equal opportunity for success and happiness.
He mentioned gun control, women’s and gay rights, and health care. He also devoted a significant part of his speech to climate change and the need to transform the country’s economy to clean energy. He also called on the U.S. to steer away from “perpetual war” and give the peacemakers the dominant role in the international theatre of conflict.
As he spoke in front of the Capitol festooned with flags and bunting and before an estimated crowd of 600,000 to 800,000 people that stretched like a great river all the way down the Mall to the Washington Monument. The inauguration coincided with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
“While history tells us that these truths may be selfevident, they have never been self-executed,” he said. “While freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on Earth.”
He said that the revolution was not fought simply to replace a king with an elitist society or a raging mob.
Invoking the memory of civil war president Abraham Lincoln, he said, “We learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive halfslave and half-free.”
In an apparent message to Wall Street, he said, “Together we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to assure competition and fair play.” And he added: “Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”
Obama announced that a “decade of war is now ended” (even though America is still at war in Afghanistan and the “war” against terrorism is ongoing) and “an economic recovery has begun.”
He reiterated his platform that “America’s prosperity rests on the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.”
“We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work, when the wages of honest labour liberate families from the brink of hardship.”
Raising his voice to a new, more powerful levels of oratory, he said, “We will respond to the threat of climatechange knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. One may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science,” he said, adding that no one can deny the “devastating impact of raging fires, crippling drought, more powerful storms.
“A path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult, but America cannot resist this transition.Wemustleadit.We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industry. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasures, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snowcapped peaks. That his how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.”
Obama made similar statements in his inaugural address in 2009, but made little progress on climate change and barely mentioned it during the election campaign.
He said the United States cannot have peace through perpetual war. “We are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war,” he said. Peaceful engagement can “more durably lift suspicion and fear.”
The U.S., he promised, “will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe.”
Vowing to support democracy and peace throughout the world, he said “our interests and our conscience propel us along the path of those who long for freedom.
“No one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation,” he said. “We must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of a crisis, not out of mere charity but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice.”
The crowds cheered as former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter entered the stage. George W. Bush did not show up. His father, George H.W. Bush, sent congratulations.
When Obama’s wife, Michelle, appeared with her new hairstyle, there was a discussion in the crowd about whether it was a wig. When a white man said it wasn’t, all the black women gave him the “Are you kidding” look. “It’s pieces,” one woman said.
Among the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the inaugural ceremonies, was Natalie Jones, 74, an African-American art gallery curator from New York City. Jones’s husband, who died a few years ago, was a civil rights worker with Martin Luther King. She grew up in Kentucky where she soon learned about segregation and the experience of “sitting at the back of the bus.”
“I never thought I would see anything like this,” she said, referring to Obama’s election and then his re-election. She said she grew up in a time when if there was a “person of colour on the TV my dad would call everybody to the TV ...”
And there on the big screen was Barack Obama, U.S. president and commander-inchief, before the whole country and the world.
Inaugural addresses are often embarrassing. Lacking the historic moment to support their oratory, presidents reach for the lyrical, and end up grasping at air. Speechwriters take note: Fine writing is always to be avoided, but never more so than when you risk making the world’s fool of your boss.
This was not one of those occasions. After a bruising first term, Barack Obama was not in the mood to be lyrical. Instead, it was brisk, businesslike and brutal — not by any means the shortest inaugural, but surely among the punchiest. Where some inaugurals seek to lift up, this one threw down; where some extend a hand, this drew a line. It was focused, blunt and unequivocal, the most full-throated defence of liberalism in an inaugural since FDR’s second, to which it bears some resemblance: the same hymns to the power of the collective, the same us-and-them taunting of the wealthy and quite a bit more scolding of the opposition.
While the Declaration of Independence had asserted the unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said, “fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges.” In today’s world, “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”
“No single person,” he advised, “can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.”
I’m not sure who thinks the alternative to doing all these things through the state is to have it all done by one person, but by then he had moved on. “Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. … The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid and Social Security … do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
Whatever the Founding Fathers would have thought of these, it was clear they would have approved of a carbon tax. “We will respond to the threat of climate change,” he vowed, even if some “still deny the overwhelming judgment of science.” Not only would “the failure to do so … betray our children and future generations,” but doing so “will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”
More plausibly, he positioned a number of current issues as part of a historic journey to “complete” the Declaration’s second-most famous assertion, that “all men are created equal,” in the tradition of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Thus equal pay for women; thus same-sex marriage (“our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law”); and thus, um, gun control, here rechristened as keeping children “safe from harm.”
But there was no time to lose. “We must act,” he urged, which turned out to mean others must stop preventing us from acting. “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat namecalling as reasoned debate.” In his first inaugural, Obama had decried “the recriminations and worn-out dogmas” as well as “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long” in a way that everyone took to mean both parties. This time the blame seemed rather more specific.
I do not intend this as criticism. Obama’s record hardly supports the leftist stereotype of his detractors: The expansion of government in his first term had more to do with circumstances than ideology, and could as well have been carried out, for the most part, by a moderate Republican. But it aroused a great deal of opposition, even obstructionism among congressional Republicans, and although there is some shared responsibility for the later stalemates over the budget — read Bob Woodward’s The Price of Politics for an account of Obama’s failings as a negotiator — there is no doubt that the GOP, largely thanks to its more extreme elements, have borne the brunt of the resulting public dissatisfaction. Indeed, Obama owes his re-election to them in no small part.
Can you blame him, then, for taking advantage of the Republicans’ post-election disarray? We have seen how he ran the table with them in the fiscal cliff negotiations, exploiting the divisions between the GOP’s moderate and radical wings. The debtceiling fight was shaping up as much the same, had the Republicans not signalled a three-month truce. Any president, presented with such an opportunity, would seize it. If that marks a shift in approach, from the “postpartisan” statesman of 2009 to the hard-charging partisan of 2013, well, you take each situation as you find it.
As with any second-term president, moreover, Obama has only a short window in which to get much done: 18 months, two years at most. Gun control and immigration reform, each a major political challenge on its own, had already been teed up, along with the sweeping changes to the tax code and entitlement programs that are envisaged as part of a budget deal. To that already crowded agenda the inaugural has added action on climate change — and all to be achieved before the midterm elections in 2014, and the inevitable waning of his authority that follows.
He is about to put the hammer down, in other words, and for that he will need all the enthusiasm from his supporters he can possibly muster. That is what this speech inaugurated.