Some axes

Katty Kay:

Why am I coming over all queasy this week? Oh, yes, it must be coronation--sorry, inauguration--week in the federation of the United States. So this is why you booted us out a couple of centuries ago. You simply replaced the pomp and ceremony of hereditary monarchy and with the pomp and ceremony of elected monarchy. OK, you didn't opt for the dynastic duo of Bush and Clinton, which really had us scratching our crowned European heads, but the fanfare with which Caroline Kennedy has entered the political picture suggests your infatuation with royal families is still not over

This week Washington feels like London in the run up to one of our own grand royal events. Hostesses twitter on the phone, or just Twitter, to woo A-list guests to pre- and post-inauguration parties. A-list guests measure their piles of invites in feet, not inches (forget the endangered rain forest, this event justifies a few more trees), while the lowly populous frets over inaugural road closures and inconvenient security measures. The problem is, you've adopted circumstance without the scandal. Our royals do it much better.

NRO:

The most problematic parts of the speech, for me, had to do with the theme that always bothers me at such occasions: the dismissal of political differences as insignificant and petty products of irresponsibility, rather than of serious and meaningful disagreements about how our country should govern itself. What possible sense could be made of this passage in the speech?

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.

Is everything that preceded the coming of Obama in our politics childish and petty? Every president calls for replacing partisanship with responsibility—Obama’s call on this front can be found almost verbatim in Bush’s 2000 campaign speeches. But maybe the reason it never works is that partisanship very often is responsible, and our disagreements are not childish things but serious substantive debates about important subjects, given form by some profound differences in worldview.

Wilkinson:

I don’t think this is so much classic Obama as classic politics. Strategically, the speech was a commonplace effort to reduce resistance to a political agenda by generating a vague sense of uplifting cohesion and casting any possible opposition as outmoded, small-spirited, and immature. Politicians take this tack because it works, and Obama’s really good at it. People liked it. It worked the perennial rhetoric of transformative politics expertly, but if you were expecting something truly transformative, beyond the transformative fact of a black president, then you’ve got to be a bit disappointed.

David Frum:

One thing to learn from that speech - Obama is adjusting to his new role. He has learned that he must delegate even his own writing, which cannot have been easy. I feel sure that speech was not the personal work of this highly eloquent man. It takes a team of highly trained professionals to produce something quite so flat!

hilzoy:

I've been trying to figure out what to say about the inauguration, with no success at all. I will only say: it feels like waking up from a horrible dream. -- I have travelled outside the US a lot. All my life, when people have criticized the US, I have tried to stick up for it where possible, and where it wasn't possible, to explain. I couldn't do either with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, or Iraq, or, since about 2002, really much of anything. For the first time in eight years, I feel as though I can be proud not just of the ideals to which my country aspires, but of how it is working towards them: not just of its aspirations, but of its reality. And that means so much to me.

Al Jazeera:

Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst, said Obama's speech was aimed at convincing Americans that he will take a different course from Bush.

But Robert Fisk, a Beirut-based journalist for the London-based Independent newspaper, said the speech did not highlight any major shift in US strategy.

"I do not think there was a great difference from the rhetoric of Bush, but we didn't get taken through 9/11 again," he said.

Fisk said the speech was being "meagre on the Middle East" as it did not refer to the Palestinian issue.

"Many people in this region [the Middle East] are going to say 'didn't he see the pictures on TV in the last few days?'.

"It's the Middle East that will come back again and again and I don't think he chose to address it," he said.

Sorry, you're not that important, inaugurations are to set the tone of an entire presidency not deal with immediate crises. Give the man a few days to get his cabinet in order and end the festivities and answer all the congratulations from foreign heads of state, sheesh. He did shout out to the Muslim world with one paragraph.

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