In Second Inaugural Address, Can President Obama Reassure a Worried Public?

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-01-20 03:17Z by Steven

In Second Inaugural Address, Can President Obama Reassure a Worried Public?

The Daily Beast
2013-01-19

Evan Thomas

These are gloomy times for an inauguration. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas asks: On Monday, can the president rise to the occasion with a historically inspiring message?

The last Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, dawned bright and cold. More than a million people, possibly the largest live audience ever to see a president inaugurated, and certainly the biggest since Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in 1965, streamed to the Washington Mall for Barack Obama’s oath-taking as the 44th president of the United States. Even the most jaded old Washington hands could feel a different vibe in the crowd—people seemed excited, happy, some teary-eyed to witness, for the first time in history, an African-American sworn in as chief executive.

A president who is writing (or, more likely, editing and refining) his inaugural address is confronted with a very difficult challenge: how to speak in his own true voice while at the same time speaking for every man and woman. The challenge to be at once unique and universal has defeated virtually all of Obama’s predecessors. With a few memorable ­exceptions—like JFK’s, Lincoln’s second, FDR’s first (“the only thing to fear is fear itself”)—inaugural addresses have long disappointed their expectant listeners. The words rarely live up to the occasion. Most inaugural addresses “tend not to be very good,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “The best rhetoric has been used up in the campaign, and presidents don’t want to promise too much. They are planning to give their first State of the Union addresses in a few weeks and they don’t want to preempt. Plus, most presidents are not good speakers or writers.”…

Read the entire article here.

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