Obama Falls Short

If you were looking to President Barack Obama’s inaugural address for an escape from a gloomy January, you should have taken that flight to Bermuda.

If you wanted a low-cost respite from the slumping stock market, you should have gone to the movies.

Obama may have fallen a little short of all the stratospheric expectations for a moonshot inaugural address. But it still reached significant altitude as a somber, gut-check distillation of this all-too-treacherous moment for a nation still in denial.

That’s exactly what Obama promised. And it’s exactly what the speech should have been.

“Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” Obama said early in his 18-minute address. “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

“Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

It was, in short, an address for these times.

To reach for anything more dramatic, anything more Martin Luther King-like given the proximity to the site of the preacher’s most quoted speech, would have cast the spotlight too much on Obama, rather than the dire fix the nation is in.

At the same time, the speech was something else: a new president’s clarion call for patience, a theme that Obama and his top aides have returned to repeatedly in recent days.

Don’t expect miracles, Obama said in so many words. At least not overnight.

“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real,” he said. “They are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.”

Consider Tuesday’s address an update of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address 48 years ago and its most famous phrase — delivered on an even colder day, with threats on the horizon that were very different and yet every bit as serious as those today.

That day, Kennedy memorably urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Obama, who sought help with his address from two of Kennedy’s old speechwriters, Ted Sorensen and Dick Goodwin, introduced the idea of shared sacrifice by honoring American soldiers “who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains.”

Continued the new president: “We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.

“And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all. For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours.”

This movement of spirit must happen quickly, Obama said. The time to act has come. Big ideas must be embraced. Wrenching decisions must be made.

“Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed,” Obama declared. “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.”

source: http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics/story/992926.html