Obama's speech a quiet call to arms for Americans

WASHINGTON (AP) — He spoke with gravity of the troubled times at hand and with confidence of the possibilities ahead, giving subtle nod to the groundbreaking nature of his ascendance to the presidency.

Barack Obama used his inaugural address Tuesday to sketch a quiet and thoughtful portrait of the nation as it is, and as it should be.

And then he placed the onus for moving from the realities of today to the promise of the future squarely on the nation at large.

The burden of hope, of change, is not simply the president’s, he reasoned, but a shared mission given to all Americans.

“Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed,” Obama said. “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Obama spoke of a “new era of responsibility” and of “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

It was both a call for personal accountability, and a repudiation of the Bush years.

The expectations could not have been higher for Obama, known for his eloquence as a speaker, and he answered them with a speech that was both compact and powerful. Only time will tell if the words resonate in the nation’s memory as long as his acts in office are certain to do.

Rather than a collection of sound bites, his 18-minute address was a set piece, meant to be listened to from start to finish.
Without overreaching for soaring rhetoric, he spoke first to the challenges at hand.

“At these moments,” he told the nation, “America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.”

Unlike John F. Kennedy’s inaugural, which spoke of a blaring trumpet that summons the nation to service, Obama’s was a quiet call to arms.

In his unflinching description of the challenges ahead, he echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt, who spoke in his first inaugural of grim “common difficulties” that the country would conquer together.

Obama’s speech took note of his historic place as the first black president in understated but deliberate language.

He spoke of himself as “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant” yet one who now could take its most sacred oath.

Wayne Fields, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on presidential rhetoric, said it was a way to signal that the nation has moved beyond the divisions of the past. Just as Obama is comfortable with his own identity, Fields said, his speech suggested the nation, too, has a new opinion of itself.

Fields said the speech drew its power not from pithy lines meant to end up hanging on an “embroidered sampler,” but from its careful evocation of a sense of community and common resolve.

Former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen called it “an excellent speech, well delivered.”

Whether it will one day be regarded as among the greatest of inaugural addresses, Sorensen said, will only be known in years to come.

But he said the speech drew power not just from its content but from its context.

“Given the historic nature of the change from all white presidents to the first nonwhite president, and from eight years of war and anti-government philosophy to a completely new outlook on foreign and domestic policy,” Sorensen said, “that by itself guarantees that the speech will live.”