Obama Second Inaugural, and Reactions

Terrific second inaugural speech from the President yesterday.  I was at work and had to content myself with reading the text at first – then looked it up on YouTube last night when I got home, since it’s always better to hear the man deliver his words.  Nice!

Some reactions I’ve found interesting and/or valuable:

Charles Pierce, who has little patience for moderation when it comes to justice, and has thus been impatient with Obama from the beginning, was pleased.  Just one slice of his reaction to the speech:

The president’s second inaugural address was as clear a statement of progressive principles as a president has given since LBJ got up there and shoved the Voting Rights Act and the words “We shall overcome” right up old Richard Russell’s …[I’ll let you fill that in.  Steve]

…

The speech was a bold refutation of almost everything the Republican party has stood for over the past 40 years. It was a loud — and, for this president, damned near derisive — denouncement of all the mindless, reactionary bunkum that the Republicans have come to stand for in 2013; you could hear the sound of the punch he landed on the subject of global warming halfway to Annapolis. But the meat of the speech was a brave assertion of the power of government, not as an alien entity, but as an instrument of the collective will and desires of a self-governing people.

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well.Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm. That is our generation’s task, to make these works, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

We are not free because we are individuals, the president told them, daring them to hold two ideas in their heads at a time without their brains leaking out of their ears. We are free because, as individuals we work together in the creative act of self-government to produce a viable political commonwealth in which that freedom can thrive and prosper, and the primary instrument of that commonwealth is the government we devise out of it. That government must be allowed to function. That government must be allowed to operate for this freedom to be generally achieved.

James Fallows, himself a recovering speech-writer, often has striking observations on the language a speaker uses.  I benefited from his discussion of the “lash and sword” language Obama used, drawing on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and his 1858 “House Divided” speech.  And he liked the eloquence of “Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall,” as did I.  Read him here and here.

And Paul Krugman, who has also been impatient with Obama at times, noted “Seneca, Selma and Stonewall,” too.  I confess surprise at the attitude change he references below.  How can it be that something that seems quite normal now (at least to me) was – during my adult lifetime – unacceptable to more than half the populace?  And can we not take at least a bit of satisfaction in the fact that we’re on the right side of the attitude curve now?

In his speech, Obama invoked the history of struggles for equality with a remarkable triptych: Seneca (women’s rights), Selma (black rights), and Stonewall (gay rights). And there has been remarkably little blowback — a sign of how much the country has changed.

What many people may not realize is how recent those changes are. Gay rights may be relatively obvious — it’s just 8 years since opposition to gay marriage arguably played a significant role in Bush’s victory. But the big changes on the racial front are also more recent than widely imagined (obligatory disclaimer — yes, there’s a lot of racism remaining, and it can be truly ugly; we’re just talking about relative changes). Here’s a poll trend that seems meaningful to me:

Republicans pine for the glory days of Ronald Reagan — but that was a different country, a county with a lot more raw racism, a country in which only a minority of Americans found interracial marriage acceptable. And yes, that had a lot to do with GOP political strength.

And I don’t think the right has a clue how to operate in the better nation we’ve become.

Finally, and not related to the speech itself, a friend pointed me to the lovely, evocative Inaugural Poem by Richard Blanco, “One Today”: