Not surprisingly, the mainstream media adored Barack Obama's inaugural address yesterday. Of course, they shiver whenever the guy just shows up.But even the foolish worship of the press cannot sufficiently make up for the fact that Obama's much-anticipated inauguration speech, coming as it was from the glorified orator himself who had months to work on it, turned out to be unexpectedly uninspiring.
Golly gee, Aunt Gertrude; he sounded so...so mortal.
Here's a few reactions:
Wynton Hall -- Clichéd, surprisingly dull, naive, and memorable only insofar as it was forgettable.
Mr. Obama's oration wasn't even the obligatory presidential jeremiad, a form that would, in this present hour, have been perfectly suited to meet the rhetorical situation. It was a schizophrenic speech that couldn't quite make up its mind whether we were in a time of peril and doom or simply suffering from national indigestion. The threadbare weather metaphors were meant to be archetypal. Instead, they were sophomoric in the extreme ("rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace" and "gathering clouds and raging storms")...
Instead, we heard an army of clichés marching across the new president’s palate. The result: a phantasmagoria of naiveté. We were promised that our new president would "harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." We were told that "old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace." We were told that "our security emanates from the justness of our cause."
Really? Is that true? Does that mean that our lack of security on September 11th was a function of our national pursuit of an unjust cause? And if so, what, pray tell, was said cause? Do we really want to slog through the Ward Churchill debates yet again?
These and other rhetorical overreaches made Obama's oration an unusually unmeasured Inaugural Address...
Susan Salter Reynolds in the fawning LA Times -- More novel than short story, more ballad than poem -- writers agree that restraint and plain speaking were the qualities that distinguished President Obama's inaugural address. Long on plot (and it will thicken), it did what literature does best: the backward glance, the standing on shoulders, the salute to ancestors and other sources of wisdom.
"He is our first (in the best sense of the word) aristocratic president," author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell told The Times. "Bush was a buddy. Clinton was the kindly uncle. Obama is a prince."...
Alex Spillius in the Telegraph (U.K.) -- Quite a day, but not much of speech unfortunately. Obama got where he is by speechifying, but this effort would not have won him many votes. It was his worst on a grand stage, though still better than most politicians could muster.
The delivery, as ever, was first class, but the message was wasn't clear enough and the language not insufficiently inspiring.
As soon as the applause had died down, an African American standing man near me on the Mall said to his friend: "I thought the speech was *#^%@* Another woman said, correctly, that "we had heard it all before at other events"...
Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University in Connecticut -- In President Obama's brilliant, deeply felt Inaugural Address, we find echoes of the great speeches of the past: the acknowledgment of challenge and trepidation from FDR, the call to service of JFK, the assertion of strength within a context of justice of Ronald Reagan. President Obama's rhetoric, as we expected, reached back to the cadences of Lincoln, and tied those together with the soaring voice of King. It was a dignified, thoughtful speech -- worthy of the great orator who delivered it and appropriate to our perilous times...
Jeff Emanuel, Combat journalist -- It's great to see the sudden outpouring of pro-Americanism and goodwill from a population which managed to repress those emotions so successfully over the last eight years...
Terence Jeffrey -- In monarchies, kings and queens use the first person plural. They are "we." Judging from his inaugural address, President Barack Obama may give this practice a modern American liberal twist. He calls big government "we."
Obama's speech was a carefully crafted self-contradiction, with a beginning and end that could have been delivered by a conservative and a middle that envisioned government unleashed from constitutional restraints...
Jay Rubin -- It's an omen for our time, a harbinger, a clue as to what we might expect for the next four years: Barack Obama was not President of the United States for five minutes before he spoke his first untruth to the American people.
In the first sentence of the second paragraph of his inaugural address, Obama stated that "Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath." This is just not true. And if Barack Obama is as smart as the mainstream media has proclaimed, he ought to have known better...
Perhaps this represents the first crack in Obama's impervious armor, the first clue that he's really not as smart or as knowledgeable as so many would like to believe. If that's the case, that's fine. It just proves the he, like the rest of us mere mortals, is prone to making mistakes. It also tells us that he's not a very good fact checker, that he may not be sufficiently detail-oriented-something we should all be at least a little concerned about...
Tom Baldwin in the Times (U.K.) -- ...In a sombre speech that had little of the soaring rhetoric with which he is associated, he acknowledged that his nation was in the midst of a crisis and that its challenges would not be easily met. “But know this, America: they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” he said. “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
To underline the challenges that he faces, the US stock market fell 4 per cent, its worst ever Inauguration Day fall, eclipsing the 2.3 per cent decline in 1929 for Herbert Hoover and the advent of the Great Depression...
Fred Barnes -- It was far from the best speech Barack Obama has ever delivered. As an inaugural address, it won't be mentioned in the same breath as inaugural speeches by Presidents Lincoln, Roosevelt (Franklin), Kennedy, or Reagan. And Obama uncharacteristically rushed through the speech as if he was impatient to get the swearing-in ceremony over with.
But it had some interesting and even surprising moments. When he talked about moving beyond "worn out dogmas," Obama echoed Bill Clinton's effort to claim new political ground between conservatism and liberalism, what he called a "third way." He had a few lines presumably aimed at pleasing Republicans. And while he heralded a "new age" in America and the world, he didn't make a very strong case for it.
Like a lot of politicians, Obama is in love with the word "new." He referred to "a new era of peace" and "a new life" and "a new way" and "a new era of responsibility." And near the top of his speech, he declared that Americans must "prepare for a new age." Really? The way he described the coming age it sounded a bit old...
