Alter: Obama Launches the Responsibility Era

After Sen. Ted Kennedy suffered a seizure, President Obama made some extemporaneous remarks at the congressional luncheon that summarized the day and his presidency.

This is "a joyous but also a sobering time," he said.

The sheer joy of the nation and the world on the occasion of Barack Obama becoming president is hard to exaggerate. It certainly exceeds anything in the public realm that I've witnessed in my lifetime. This is also true of Americans in their 80s and 90s. Many of those in attendance and watching on television wept. They feel they have their country back. The country they love.

This will fade. Obama will make mistakes. He could get swamped by unexpected events. But his performance over the last two years suggests that he is the man for this moment.

Obama's inaugural address reinforced this perception. It was eloquent but lacked the soaring poetry of so much of the campaign. It was a prose speech for a time of rough renewal. Quoting Scripture, he said, "The time has come to set aside childish things."

The time has passed, Obama said, for "putting off unpleasant decisions." If "the ground has shifted beneath them [the cynics]," as he suggested, we may be in for a bigger political earthquake than even his most ardent backers would have predicted last year. Major energy and health-care change is coming. But when his tax increases and entitlement cuts come, some of these backers might not like the hard truths they hear.

The words "terrorism" and "war on terror" did not pass Obama's lips. In a muscular passage that warned America's enemies not to underestimate him, Obama vowed to crush a "far-reaching network of violence and hatred." But the era defined by the language of terror is over. So is the assault on the Constitution: "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

Some commentators noted that the speech lacked an unforgettable line. Two points: First, this is Obama's style. Neither his famous Philadelphia speech on race nor his acceptance speech in Denver contained sound bites. He loathes them, and thinks the media's obsession with one-liners undermines sustained argument.
Second, it can take time for a line to penetrate. FDR's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" was on the inside pages of most accounts of his speech. The same for Dr. King's "I have a dream" line. So something may emerge from this speech that is hard to predict before it sinks in further.

Rick Warren mentioned Jesus in his invocation. He shouldn't have. Earlier inaugurals have carefully struck an ecumenical tone, as Obama did in his own remarks. But Warren was right that all of us present in Washington and watching around the world have witnessed a "hinge point of history."