President Obama today gave his Second Inaugural address on the West steps of the Capitol. On the surface, most of the speech seemed unobjectionable and could be given by any number of Republican presidents. But on a closer reading, and pairing that reading with what Obama has said in other places, we can more closely follow what he was trying to do in the speech. From the opening:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
Almost completely unobjectionable (history tells us?); but this came from the same man who said the following in his book, The Audacity of Hope:
Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infalibility or any idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might look future generations into a single, unalterable course.
Seems a little contradictory with what he said today, to say the least. Anyway, let's move on.
Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character.
But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.
Jonah Goldberg basically nails the first problem with this whole formulation:
In other words, the old platitudes I just paid lip service to — and which continue to poll well — can now only be realized by embracing their philosophical opposite. In this case, individual freedom through collective action!
The second problem is the basic illogic of it, especially the second paragraph. The entire very confused part about American soldiers, muskets and militias (an obvious rhetorical bow to the current gun control debate) and the defeat of communism and fascism is meaningless. So is the part just beneath it regarding some mythical "single person" who wants to train all of the U.S.'s future math and science teachers. I honestly couldn't assign any rational meaning to any of it.
This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.
Though most of the troops have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, the war has certainly not ended. And when did the economy begin to recover? I must have missed that part. The old liberal standbys diversity and openness show up here, along with the idea of reinvention, which does not seem at all consistent with what he voiced before about the self-evident truths of our Founding.
We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.
Who are the group of people (who it seems are large enough in number to address in a second inaugural) who believe that we "must choose" between the old and the young? Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan went out of their way in the months running up to the election to let the people know that their plan in no way affected those 55 and over.
It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.
If that were an actual problem, I guess this would be a big deal.
Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
I am not aware that gays and lesbians face the same kind of animus and threats of violence against them that blacks did in this country for far too long. Although I am not going to go further down this road, marriage is more than just about "love." If we really followed President Obama's logic in this regard, I think we may recoil to where it might lead us.
For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. (Emphasis added.)
The bolded section is wonderful coming from the man who was behind a recently finished campaign that implied that his opponents' policies would result in (at least figuratively) throwing old people off cliffs, cancer, and death.
Though President Obama hearkened back to the Founding and its principles in this speech, he did so in the spirit of FDR: cloaking the new and radical in the old and traditional. Hopefully in the coming four years, an increasing number of the American People will awaken to the true transformational nature of the presidency of Barack Obama.
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