A few of the more irrationally enthused pundits have been comparing to Barack Obama’s second inaugural address to Abraham Lincoln’s. They must assume, probably with good reason, that the past many years of high school history classes have not required anyone to read Lincoln’s speech.
Lincoln’s second inaugural address is not just a masterpiece of political oratory but also of English prose, a speech of such simple eloquence and profound wisdom that it inspired a nation in its darkest hour. The Obama effort, on the other hand, was an overwrought and overlong bunch of hooey.
Lincoln forthrightly addressed only the issues that were of overriding importance at the time of his address, but Obama made just passing mention of the issues that most concern the Americans of today. With more Americans out of work than on the day he was first sworn in, and the sluggish economic pace slowing, Obama assured the nation’s unemployed that “Economic recovery has begun.” There was some lofty blather about investing in new technologies, but it seemed to be mostly about the “green energy” program that has already blown billions of dollars with little effect. He offered sympathy and scapegoats rather than solutions by noting that “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do well and a growing many barely make it,” but if he believes that people have concluded the growing many are barely making it because the shrinking few are doing well he should have corrected that dangerous misunderstanding.
The nation’s debt has grown by 60 percent since Obama’s first inaugural address, and the second inaugural address made no mention of this problem. All that investing Obama wants the government to do will likely be quite expensive, and he also used his speech to engage in some characteristic demagogy against anyone who might suggest changes to the money-guzzling entitlement programs, so the omission seemed conspicuous.
Like Lincoln, Obama spoke of war, but where Lincoln spoke of “the progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends,” Obama simply declared that “a decade of war is now ending.” The speech did not make clear if the war is also ending for America’s numerous declared enemies, who seem to be as deadly as ever lately, or if America will simply be ceasing its efforts, and we would have liked to have had the point clarified. Obama attempted to reassure us neo-con warmongers that “America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the world,” which should provide plenty of action for our shrinking military, and that America will “support democracy from Asia to Africa, from the Americas to the Middle East,” but he did not explain how military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood will further this noble cause.
Most of what Obama did get around to in the speech was primarily of interest to his most doctrinaire admirers. He gave a shout-out to his homosexual voters, promised the ladies that he’d deal with their mythical wage discrimination problem, expressed outrage about all the illegal immigrant engineers that are apparently being “expelled” from the country, and did the usual fretting about the poor folk. Although Obama didn’t dare get so sternly theological as Lincoln did in his second inaugural address, he did make mention of God when going on about climate change. Lincoln was duly humble about evoking God’s name, noting that “The Almighty has His own purposes” and recognizing that he was right only to the extent “as God gives us to see the right,” but Obama was quite confident that God wouldn’t mind being used for the higher purpose of promoting a cap-and-trade boondoggle.
The speech was all wrapped up in red-white-and-blue bunting, complete with approving references to the founding fathers. There was even a line about how Americans “have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all of society’s ills can be solved through government alone,” although it was unclear if this was meant as a compliment or complaint. A recurring theme of the speech was that the Founding Fathers began a journey that will only be completed once the Obama agenda has been fully enacted and “all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hill of Appalachia to the quite lanes of Newtown know they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.” We took that to be a call for stricter gun controls, but we figure it will be a long journey indeed if it only ends when everyone is safe from harm and we hope that we’ll still be allowed to arm ourselves until journey’s end.
There was plenty of the usual highfalutin rhetoric, and although we only read the transcript we assume it was delivered with the usual sonorous baritone and upraised chin, but unless Obama gets all the educational reforms he hoped for it is unlikely that schoolchildren will find anything so rote-worthy as “With malice towards none, with charity toward all.” Obama struck a slightly similar note when he insisted America cannot “treat name-calling as reasoned debate,” but it rang rather hollow after winning his spot on the inaugural stand by slurring his opponent as a tax-cheating, woman-killing, dog-torturing, contraception-snatching square. All in all, we expect that the world will little note nor long remember what Obama said on Inauguration Day.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 