The Speech (Continued)

I should have known that if I wanted something useful on the Inaugural Address I'd best go to the New Yorker.  Editor David Remnick found a historical parallel with FDR: In 1933, F.D.R. came into office with an Inaugural Speech calling for fearlessness in the face of horrific adversity; four years later, with greater confidence, he outlined the framework of a liberal state—“the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization.” That seemed to be what Barack Obama was after Monday, an echo of F.D.R. in 1937—a reassertion of government, of commonality.

I see Remnick's point in how Obama's two speeches contrast.  But in this speech President Obama did what he has been doing since the weeks before the 2012 campaign began, and all the way through it: redefining the center, the common sense space where most Americans agree.  Most Americans support Medicare, equal pay, immigration reform, addressing the climate crisis--even gay rights and gay marriage, and everything he has proposed on guns.  Most Americans even want the government to regulate commerce, safeguard public health and fix the damn bridges.  What is so controversial, except with a shrinking minority of loudmouths?  

Also at the New Yorker, Amy Davidson noted a transfigured echo of Lincoln's second Inaugural in this section from Obama's: "Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together."  It's the lash and sword sentence.  She didn't need to point out that "half-slave and half-free" are also Lincoln, as in the echo of "anew."  JFK echoed the "anew" in his Inaugural, and quoted the "half slave and half free" line on another occasion.  The "by lash" is of course a reference to slavery, and it is a reference of particular power from the nation's first black President, as well as his recognition of a past unforgotten in the black community.

Early in the speech, he linked the Constitution ("We, the people") and Declaration of Independence ("most evident of truths" etc.) to Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial which in essence was simply that: a link from the Founding assertions to the future:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

Well, that has special meaning for me because he was talking about my footprints--I was in that crowd on the Mall .  We were 400,000 strong that hot August day.  This year they were a million (including Mike and Alice) from all over the country and the world.

Amy Davidson moves smoothly from the Inaugural Address to the only piece I've read all the way through on the First Lady's Inaugural Ball dress, and her sense of style.  Cool.