The speech
President Obama's inaugural address was, I think, quite good for what it was. Obama wanted, I assume, to sound like a president and to offer something for everyone. With a decent text and strong oratory, he succeeded on the first count. As to the second, the new president sounded enough themes to placate most of the political spectrum, though not those like me who might have hoped for a more gracious, fair-minded account of the last eight years.
The speech was classic Obama -- the kind of fine-sounding, frivolous fare in which the idea that we face specific trade-offs is dismissed as cynicism, even as we're told in the most general way of the need for sacrifice and to make tought choices. The debates in which serious people on both sides of the political spectrum have engaged for decades were dismissed as "childish," as if there exists some magic synthesis that everyone up until now has missed. Today, the contours of this grand synthesis went once again unstated.
If Obama believed his own rhetoric, it would be scary. But like most of his predecessors, he comes to office believing almost exclusively in himself -- a somewhat less frightening proposition.
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