It is a rich irony that the true audacity of President Obama’s inaugural address was its dampening of hope. Having campaigned under a banner emblazoned with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, the 44th President’s first act of government was to administer a stiff dose of realism. He had been expected, with good reason, to emulate the sonorous rhetoric of Lincoln. But the presiding spirit of this speech was George Washington, who spoke in his own first inaugural address in 1789 of his ‘great anxieties’ and ‘the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me’.
One of the most striking passages of President Obama’s speech was his invocation of the text Washington ordered to be read to desolate American revolutionaries camping in the cold in 1776: ‘Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].’ Thus did the new Commander-in-Chief seek to import the spirit of the American Revolution to his own era and, specifically, his response to the economic crisis that will do so much to define his presidency.
If the theme of the speech was the ‘remaking of America’, its deepest cunning was its quarrying of the past and self-conscious traditionalism. For all the obvious echoes of John F. Kennedy, and the epochal symbolism of a black man taking the presidential oath, there was no passing of the torch, no explicit supplanting of one generation by another. Rather, the new President rooted his rhetoric in the inspiration of the past: the first rugged colonists, the Founding Fathers, those who fought at Concord and Gettysburg, ‘the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington’. He invited the American people not to rebel against the past, but to act as ‘keepers of this legacy.’ There was more memory in this speech than portentous futurism.
Naturally, there was a clear renunciation of the Bush era (‘we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals’), a predictable emphasis upon environmentalism, and a no less platitudinous plea for multilateralism in foreign policy. But there were clear signs of continuity, too. David Miliband, who recently denied the existence of a global Islamist threat, must have been dismayed to hear the new President unambiguously declare that ‘our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred’.
Even when the President claimed explicitly to be breaking with the past and making new promises, he was often doing no such thing. The ‘new era of responsibility’ sounded very similar to Bill Clinton’s ‘season of service’ or George W. Bush’s ‘responsibility era’. On the role of the state, Obama said: ‘The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.’ This was instantly hailed as a dramatic punctuation mark in global political practice: the Reagan–Thatcher era of hostility to government, it was claimed, was now definitively over.
The truth, of course, is more nuanced. In his second inaugural address, President Clinton made very similar claims: ‘And once again, we have resolved for our time a great debate over the role of government. Today we can declare government is not the problem, and government is not the solution.’ George W. Bush frequently infuriated the Republican Right by rejecting their doctrinal antipathy to government and by declaring, as he did in his own first inaugural speech, that ‘government has great responsibilities’. There is nothing politically or philosophically original in what Obama said on Tuesday about the scale of government. And it would be a tragedy for America and the free world if his election at a time of global capitalist crisis does — as some hope — herald a return to full-blown statism.
This was the inaugural address of a President who, at the very least, grasps the limits of the rhetoric that, as much as any single factor, propelled him to the White House. The suspension of all military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay was an essential first step to recovering the moral authority lost there and in Abu Ghraib. But it will be in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the manner and pace of America’s withdrawal from Iraq that Obama’s success or failure as a war leader will be discovered; in his handling of Iran and North Korea that he reveals whether he is a global strategist of ability or a credulous liberal intellectual.
Above all, he will be judged not by his championship of ‘big plans’ before the Capitol on Tuesday, but by the practical impact of his fiscal stimulus package — $550 billion in new federal spending and $275 billion in tax cuts over two years, with the likelihood of more to come. The new President has a touching faith in grandiose government-funded infrastructure projects; in Democrat-controlled Congress, that faith approaches evangelical fervour. But the adoration of the American people for their new President will not last long if all that they have to show for the grand plan after a few years are tax rises, home repossessions and rising unemployment.
Now we shall see what this most enigmatic of politicians is truly made of. What is certain from his inaugural address, and to his credit, is that, having campaigned in poetry, he knows that the verdict of history will depend upon the prose in which he now governs.
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