In eighteen brief minutes, President Barack Obama accomplished two seemingly contradictory tasks.
On one hand, he charted a carefully postideological course between President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society faith in the ability of government to accomplish all things for all people and Ronald Reagan’s characterization of government as not the solution but the problem.
On the other, the President made it clear that on his watch, liberalism is back. Point by point, bluntly but never rudely, President Obama decisively broke with his predecessor George W. Bush’s administration and hard-line conservative world outlook. In doing so, the President enunciated a new and muscular liberalism, a liberalism that is articulate, passionate, sure of itself, and not so broadminded that it won’t take its own side in a fight.
After a generation in which the very word “liberal” had come to carry a conservative-imposed weight of pejorative baggage, liberalism’s world outlook has found a new, articulate, champion in President Barack Obama. Rarely in recent years have we on the progressive side of the aisle heard a President of the United States speak with such moral clarity and such conviction.
Today, Barack Obama singlehandedly took liberals off the endangered species list, and restored liberalism to its righful moral high ground in American discourse.
Yet, an inauguration is just that, a beginning. The challenge facing President Obama will be to find a meaningful way to keep his seemingly contradictory visions from working at cross-purposes. It is one thing to be postideological on the issue of making government work -and work well. It is another to ensure that the progressive values the President so clearly embodies do not become the victim of an excessively transactional worldview that ignores the American people’s clear expectations of change.
In short, President Obama’s administration must continue to strike the balance his campaign struck so brilliantly, between the transformational and the transactional, between “movement people” and “campaign people.” To cite just one example of the challenges that await; it is very much one thing to say that “waterboarding is torture” -and kudos to Attorney General nominee Eric Holder for candidly admitting it- but very much another to insist upon the immediate prosecution of senior members of the former administration.
And this Administration will stumble; all Administrations do. What reassures us, however, is that President Obama did not fear to confront forthrightly and articulately the national sense that we can do better, we will do better, we must do better. Not for a long time have the American people expected -and received- so clear a break with the past. Not for a long time have the American people greeted a new President with such general hope and rejoicing. Let us hope that President Obama’s inaugural address proves an accurate blueprint of his Administration’s achievements.
God willing; yes, we can.
The viewpoints expressed herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of the City of Cathedral City or any other entity.
