A fine, down the middle sort of inspirational speech. Reclaiming our ideals, green energy and a promised New New Deal for the liberals, and embracing personal responsibility, risk taking and American greatness for the conservatives. Who knows, maybe he can even get liberals to like American greatness now that a Democrat is President.
Obama is making noises like he understands that the War on Terror is not a Bush fiction. He even sounds like he is trying to name the enemy, which Bush never managed to do:
Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred...To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
I don't think even Bush mentioned the pervasiveness of scapegoating the West in the Muslim world. This is not the "tiny band of extremists in a cave" vision of Al Qaeda that the netroots have been trying to peddle.
I turned on MSNBC to listen to the anchors quiver for a while. They used every 'change' reference in the speech as a chance to get in their last cheap shots against Bush and Cheney.
I just wish Obama had not mentioned his father's village. Can't he make a speech without dragging in his autobiography? This is not about him. This is about America.
One last thought: I think there is one failed line in the inauguration speech:
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.
This is a man hoping desperately that all the mud that was slung at President Bush does not come his way in turn. All the cynics (who we can safely assume make up the majority of his listeners) know that Obama used every stale political argument in the book during his own climb to office, and that a President has little power to improve the tone in Washington. If he did, President Bush would have gotten some benefit from his unfailing graciousness even towards his enemies. I hope it will do him good with the historians, because fat lot of good it did him in Washington.
Declaring that you already achieved what your listeners know you have no power to achieve is a mistake. |
