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Obama's inaugural address -- National Malaise 2.0??
Orrin JuddThe speech is getting positive reviews from a lot of people in the loyal opposition. Mr. Judd is always something of a contrarian, but I think his critique is at least worth considering. even heading in with low expectations, I think it's fair to say that today's inaugural address wasn't just prosaic rather than poetic, as we anticipated, but actually fell flat. Indeed, what seems to have been a conscious decision to drain the occasion of soaring rhetoric and sweeping vision was so inappropriate to the requirements of the day and the role he now assumes that we may question whether he understood either. The speech he gave was reminiscent of one of those Bill Clinton State of the Union's, where you drone on about various specifics, ticking off a laundry list of items. It can at least be argued that such a speech is suitable to Congress, where you're basically advancing a legislative agenda and/or trying to shape theirs. But an Inaugural is quite a different beast. It is, or ought to be, a president's vision of where we are, where we've been, and where we're going. It's a time for sweeping strokes, not pointillism. And where we usually have a fairly good handle on who a new president is, Mr. Obama has remained unusually obscure through an election season where he studiously avoided ideas, presenting himself and the fact of his race as the primary reason to elect him. So it would have been an especially appropriate moment for him to enunciate the personal philosophy that guides him, to position that philosophy within the flow of American ideas and ideals, and to suggest where that philosophy is likely to lead him and us. (Of course, in order to do that, he first has to have a personal philosophy that guides him.) Bad enough to have whiffed on the historical context of the Inaugural Speech in general, he also got wrong what was needed from him at this specific time. While it is a good idea for him to tamp down the unreasonable expectations of the Left, which read into his silence a Progressivism that nothing in his career and candidacy supports, and of the World, which sees in him a departure from prior American presidents, even as he apes his predecessors, the sort of workmanlike tone of the address suggested a role for his presidency that no president can fill. Meanwhile, he eschewed the one role that he is particularly adapted to filling successfully. While it is self-flatting to pretend that you take on the burden of office at a uniquely difficult point in the nation's history and that will only be by your own semi-miraculous leadership that things improve, the reality is that most of the heavy-lifting on both the war and economic fronts has already been done for him. Over the next couple years he will be responsible for the orderly withdrawal of forces from the Middle East, but unless he has the unexpected good sense and moral drive to regime-change Syria, there isn't much left for him to do on the battlefield. Likewise, while he inherits an economy softened by a credit crunch, artificially high gas prices, mistakenly high interest rates, and nativism, the only one of these that hasn't yet been ameliorated is the anti-immigration problem. For the rest he can sit back and reap what's already sown. More importantly, even if there were some sort of existential crisis of the liberal democratic capitalist West, it's not as if rolling up his sleeves and hammering out legislative Rube Goldberg schemes with Congress would do anything to address that. We've had our share of presidents who descend into the details in that way and they are--without exception--failures. It isn't just that the solutions to life's problems aren't to be found in the innards of congressional actions, but that it is a waste of a president's political and personal capital to try fine-tuning such imperfect devices. What our successful presidents have done is used their office as a bully pulpit, to summon the national will to do certain things, to pressure the Congress to respond, and to establish broad frameworks to which the eventual solutions should roughly correspond. They have also used their leadership and moral and political authority to move America and Americans to overcome mere crises of confidence and moments of fright, without necessarily tying the words to legislative programs. This is where Mr. Obama could have been useful, but instead exacerbated the problem. Whether rational or not, people across the planet have greeted the coming of the Obama presidency with enormous hope and optimism. At a moment in time where we have little to fear but our funk itself, he should have drawn upon this reservoir of good will and sought to snap everyone out of it. Rather than giving such a downer of a speech and kind of covering his own butt in advance, just in case things aren't better four years from now, he should have reveled in all that is right and good and summoned us all to greater heights. Instead he asked us all to wallow with him in depressing self-indulgence about how tough times are. One hates to say it, but if you look back through recent presidential history the speech that comes closest to this one is Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech--the defects of which we've analyzed previously. It would not be all that surprising if someone as inexperienced as Mr. Obama already fears that he has taken on a job that it too big for him, as Mr. Carter's speech revealed the recognition that he was in way over his head. But to be treading so close to the edge of despair before you actually have the responsibilities is not a hopeful sign. In fairness, Mr. Obama is such a neophyte that this grievous error in tone may just be symptomatic of the steep learning curve he faces. But, jiminy-cricket, we'd better all hope and pray he's a quick learner. N.B. On the bright side, it was certainly more poetic than the official poem, which seemed to have been read off of a Scrabble board for all the sense it made.... I thought maybe I was being unduly harsh until even CNN and NPR correspondents sounded disappointed and then Hendrik Hertzberg just hammered it. Posted by: Mike 2009-01-20 |
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