President Barack Obama took the oath of office for a second term on Sunday afternoon. According to the reports it was an uncharacteristically low-key affair, arranged solely to satisfy the requirements of that pesky constitution, but there is plenty of appropriately expensive hoopla planned for today.
At the risk of sounding insufficiently respectful of the office, we’ll be doing our best to ignore it all. Obama’s first term was marked by the sluggish economic growth, vigorous expansion of an ever more meddlesome government, and declining American power that we had expected at the time of his first inauguration, and we now expect that a nation which voted for four more years of the same will wind up getting far worse. This could have been the day America began putting its finances in order, returning government to its proper limited role, and resuming the country’s leadership role in the world, but an electoral majority of the people decided to put all that bother off in favor another 99 months of unemployment checks.
None of which puts us in a celebratory mood. At least the hype should be more easily avoided this time around, so in some ways this inauguration will be less troublesome than the first.
Four years ago the inaugural festivities were inescapable. After eight years of relentless Bush-bashing from all corners of the media Obama had been elected on vague promises of hope and change, and the inauguration was regarded with an unsettling worshipfulness by a public that had only the vaguest idea what sort of change it was hoping for. There was the added angle of America’s first black president, too, heaping an extra guilt-ridden helping of historical significance onto the occasion. Obama came in to office with the most adulatory press coverage any president had ever enjoyed, compliant majorities in both houses of Congress, and sky-high approval ratings, to the point that there simply weren’t enough stations on the radio to avoid the resulting giddiness.
This time around Obama comes in with a smaller percentage of the vote after a scorched-earth campaign of hysterical vitriol against his political opponents, with a Republican majority in the House that was elected on a promise to rein in his most ambitious legislative goals, and a mere 50 percent approval rating in the latest Gallup poll. What’s left of Newsweek is heralding the inauguration as a “Second Coming,” and similarly religious imagery pops up here and there, but for the most the part the press can’t seem to muster the same messianic enthusiasm it once had. The only person we’ve encountered lately who seemed unduly enthused about the second term was slightly drunk, and even he wound up admitting that the whole Benghazi thing was an utter fiasco and that the debt has been piling up too high and will probably continue to do so.
In other ways, though, this time around feels even worse. It was bad enough to see the country fall for all that hope and change nonsense of ’08 race, and embrace a creepy cult of personality that is entirely unsuited to a free nation, but even more dispiriting to see it re-elect Obama without even the pretense of such optimistic delusions. The only rationale for Obama’s re-election was an obstinate unwillingness to face up to the country’s harrowing fiscal reality, along with a resultant willingness to believe the worst about anyone who might make the hard choices that are still available, and it looks as though the second term will be marked by the same cynical attacks on anyone who dares try to slow the nation’s headlong rush toward to financial insolvency.
The president used the last press conference of his first term to charge that the Republicans wish to see old people starving in the streets, or at least that they are “suspicious” of his heroic efforts to prevent that calamity, and while most of the media have abandoned the implausible claim that Obama is the messiah they’re still willing to echo the message that his opposition is the devil. One can still hope the House will still restrain Obama’s spending, or merely limit its increases to a level that will allow the country to forestall catastrophe long enough to get a more responsible president, and the mass protests against his gun-grabbing proclivities have already begun, but at best it will be a bitter fight with the sort of divisiveness that the president seems to relish.
By strange coincidence this inauguration day falls on what we are told is the most depressing day of every day, the “Blue Monday” when the holiday cheerfulness has entirely dissipated and the reality of a cold and dark winter settles in on the human psyche. Perhaps it’s just this calendar and the climate, but this is a bluer Monday than most.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 