I'll be discussing Obama's First Inaugural (no implication intended, but one thought of) tomorrow on Dakota Midday with Paul Guggenheimer on South Dakota Public Radio. You can listen in online using the above link (I hope!).
You can hear Obama's inaugural speech here, and read it here. As it happened, my American government class met just as the Presidency changed hands, but my smart classroom wasn't smart enough to get the streaming to work. I recommend listening to the speech in one window, and watching the text in another, which is what I did.
Inauguration day is a celebration of the American Republic. So a good inauguration speech will be the highlight of that celebration. But that can easily be at odds with the requirements for a great speech. A great speech, and there have been but few of those, does two things: it tells us where we are, and challenges us to go where we must go. Great speeches by definition involve discomfort. If it is easy to do what we need to do, no great speech is necessary or even possible. Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech was a good example. Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech was another. The latter, I think, shows that it is possible to combine a soaring pride in America's achievement with a great and disturbing challenge to right what is wrong with America. That's a really high bar, but MLK cleared it.
Barack Obama faced an enviable challenge. The very fact that he stood there, one day after Martin Luther King Day, was itself as concrete an affirmation of the United States of America as one is likely to see. The position of African Americans in the body politic has been at the center of America's promise and peril since our very beginning as a people. The Constitutional Convention, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement, were the great movements in this symphony. We now have come to the final resolution. President Obama acknowledged this, but did no more than that. He might have considered what it means for America's future.
What he did do is give a very eloquent address that rose to the occasion. Consider this:
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
That's pretty good. It celebrates what is great about America with what is proof of America's greatness. If you have a simple two bar graph representing all those who have left America to go other places over the last two years, and all those came here from other places, the one would be as tall as the width of a penny and the other would look like a skyscraper.
But it wasn't a great speech. He did a bit of scolding, some oblique criticisms of the previous administration, a lot of "our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." But if he challenged the previous administration, he didn't really challenge us. He didn't tell us what we were going to have to give up, or bear up under. Higher taxes? Social benefit cuts? More Americans slogging around in Afghanistan? No clear outline of pains to be born, or difficult decisions to be made.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…
That's the rub. Obama, like Bush before him, wants to deal with the current economic crisis by spending about two trillion dollars. But about half that is a gigantic spending package that is supposed to stimulate us out of recession, but most of which won't have any effect until years from now. Is this really government that works?
Today was a big day for America. Obama's speech was good part of that big day. But tomorrow it's back to the grind. Nothing in the speech says much about how to solve the problems we face.
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