Ross Douthat: Inauguration Archives

A Little Carter, A Little Reagan

The speech, I thought, was a sometimes-dissonant, sometimes-successful attempt to marry expansiveness and sobriety. The language of realism was woven throughout - "our collective failure to make hard choices ... the time has come to set aside childish things ...the challenges we face ... will not be met easily or in a short span of time" - and there was, as Maggie Gallagher put it, an "old-school Protestant" element to much of Obama's rhetoric, from the calls to duty and responsibility, to the promise to marry "hope and virtue," to the praise for the work ethic and criticisms of " those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame." But time and again, Obama pivoted from this theme to the sort of begin-the-world-anew rhetoric that we've come to expect from all our presidents, liberal and conservative alike - promising that hard choices are really false choices, that pragmatism can overcome partisanship, that there's no technological hurdle that Science can't leap, and that all those nameless "cynics" who worry about hubris, overreach and decline don't understand that in the brave new age of Obama, their pessimistic instincts "no longer apply." His description of our straits was sometimes Carteresque, in other words - but his prognosis tilted, inevitably, toward a liberal version of Morning in America.

Which theme is remembered depends on what the future holds, and how Obama governs: It wasn't a speech brilliant enough to write its own page in the history books, a la Kennedy's first inaugural, and so it will be assessed by future generations through the eyes of hindsight, once this presidency has a record against which his opening statement can be judged. For now, it's enough to say that no Presidency in my lifetime has begun with so much promise and peril intermingled, and that every God-fearing American should make it their business to keep Barack Obama in their prayers - today, and for many days to come.

Quote For the Day

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears have been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, Our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land

- James Weldon Johnson, "The Negro National Anthem," 1900

Achieving Our Country

I'll watching the Inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow the way a good American should: At home, over some sort of brunch, in front of a flat-screen TV. But as a good Washingtonian, I figured I should attend at least one of the weekend's events, so I hiked down to the Lincoln Memorial concert on Sunday, and spent a few hours shivering in the cold just beyond the World War II memorial (that was as close as we could get), watching as various Obama propaganda films gave way to Bono, the Boss, and Beyonce on the Jumbo-tron. I don't know if it was the "least lame president-elect-sanctioned musical event in history"- probably! - but it was disappointingly lame even so, at least from where we stood: Only Garth Brooks (and to a lesser extent Pete Seeger, who closed things out - and set left-wing hearts aflutter - by leading the crowd in a rendition of "This Land Is Your Land"), out of the star-studded roster of performers, seemed to understand that the thing to do when you have hundreds of thousands of freezing spectators is to ham it way, way up, and to confine yourself to songs that make them want to ... shout! Though to be fair, any energy a given performer managed to generate dissipated awfully quickly anyway, thanks to the interminable between-song readings from past Presidents, and past inaugurals, delivered for the most part by second-tier movie stars who really don't have any business quoting Lincoln or Roosevelt. I mean, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks, fair enough - but did I really need to shiver through a civics lecture from the likes of Jack Black, Ashley Judd and Kal Penn?

So that's the jaundiced, slightly frostbitten view of the proceedings. The kinder thing to say is that this was an impressive celebration of left-wing patriotism, the sort of thing this country hasn't seen on such a scale in years or even decades. In an essay for Time last year, Peter Beinart observed, with some accuracy, that "conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past," while "liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past." The inaugural concert was all about the latter sort: The patriotism of Seeger and Springsteen; of white Hollywood and the black church; of Gene Robinson and the Gay Men's Chorus; and of course the Pope of liberal Christianity himself. (Even Reagan was co-opted to the achieving-our-country theme: They found the most liberal-friendly line in his first inaugural - "how can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?" - and quoted it amid similar phrases from FDR and JFK, MLK and Lincoln.) I won't say that it was exactly my kind of celebration, but it was the kind of celebration that liberal America has waited an awfully long time to experience. And I would be an ungrateful graduate of many a boyhood Pete Seeger singalong - I know the "radical verses" as well as any Obamaphile - if I didn't feel happy for my left-of-center countrymen in their hour of long-awaited celebration. You can't say that they didn't work awfully hard for it.

The End of the Bush Presidency

Bob Woodward offers ten lessons to be drawn from the Bush Administration; none, as you might expect, are terribly flattering to our soon-to-be ex-President. Watching Bush's farewell address last night, what struck me above all was how long it's been since he felt like the President. Bush never had the gift of persuasion, the ability to give a State of the Union address or a press conference that left his enemies disarmed, but there was a time when he at least seemed like a leader - like someone consequential, active, and important, whatever one thought of his actions and their consequences. But that air of authority and leadership dissipated somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 midterms, and for the last two years Bush has projected the air of a bystander to history, as though events, and his presidency, were largely out of his hands.

You could imagine a different President passing through the same set of crises - Hurricane Katrina, Iraq's descent into chaos and the post-surge struggle back to some kind of stability, and finally this year's financial crisis - and coming out of them with a reputation as a battler, a man in the arena, a struggler and a doer who put his stamp on his time, even if the time was difficult and his decisions often went awry. But where the events of his second term were concerned, Bush seemed like a supporting player in his own presidency, standing in the wings while other figures - Mike Brown and Michael Chertoff; Donald Rumsfeld and then David Petraeus; Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke - took center stage, striving and erring, claiming opprobrium and credit, and generally overshadowing the man in the West Wing.

It was appropriate, in a sense, that his farewall remarks echoed his expansive Second Inaugural, with its simple (and simplistic) vision of a world divided between freedom and tyranny, and a crusading America advancing the one and defeating the other. He was at home in that rhetoric; he's never seemed at home since. And as Chris Brose suggests, while Bush's vision may have been appropriate to the post-9/11 moment, when the United States needed to be rallied against our foes, it wasn't the right sort of rhetoric for the broader era of terrorism, counterinsurgency, and counter-proliferation in which we find ourselves - and it's been consistently at odds with the gritty challenges of Bush's second term, from the post-invasion struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan to the "uncrackable" problems of Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.

And the fact that Bush never found an idiom with which to address those challenges is one of the bigger reasons why it's hard to imagine his Presidency being redeemed by history, even if the invasion of Iraq is deemed a better choice from the vantage point of 2025 than it's deemed my most today. Maybe - maybe - the gutsy decision to "surge" forces into Iraq in 2007, rather than abandon that country as lost, will make an enormous difference to the future of the Middle East. But even in making that decision, Bush never really claimed ownership of it: He had lost too much credibility, and lacked the capacity to be an advocate for the strategy he'd chosen. The surge was Bush's choice, but the policy belonged to Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, to John McCain and Robert Gates - because the presidency that's just ended seemed like it ended long ago.

Infrastructure To Nowhere

I'm a great believer in the idea that the United States needs to spend more money on our aging infrastructure, which makes me one of those conservatives who are at least faintly hopeful that the Obama Administration will use the short-term atmosphere of crisis as an opportunity to push through some smart long-term investments. But I'm also someone who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, whose downtown is in many respects a monument to the failures of a particular era of urban planning, and then spent four years at college in Boston in the midst of the Big Dig era. Which means that I don't find these cautionary passages that Tyler Cowen culls from a 2002 book on Japan all that surprising:

Few have questioned why Japan's supposed "cities of the future" are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason...or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles...

Led by bureaucrats on automatic pilot, the nation has carried certain policies -- namely construction -- to extremes that would be comical were they not also at times terrifying...

Dozens of government agencies owe their existence solely to thinking up new ways of sculpting the earth. Planned spending on public works for the decade 1995-2005 will come to an astronomical...$6.2 trillion, three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population, will spend on public construction in the same period.

...from an economic point of view the majority of the civil-engineering works do not address real needs. All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense.

...The construction industry here is so powerful that Japanese commentators often describe their country as doken kokka, a "construction state."...the millions of jobs supported by construction are not jobs created by real growth but "make work," paid for by government handouts. These are filled by people who could have been employed in services, software, and other advanced industries.

The good news is that the next generation of urban planners in the United States are unlikely to make precisely these kinds of mistakes - based on their likely reading lists, at least. The bad news is there's undoubtedly a whole new set of mistakes out there, just waiting to be made.