Inaugural Part 2
In my post last week, I talked about the tone in DC and the prospects for Obama’s Inaugural address. Sometimes it’s easy to think that the inaugural is a symbolic moment, a national orgasm that doesn’t necessarily have political implications; more of a curtain call than anything else. While that assessment isn’t altogether wrong, there are some pragmatic consequences of the address. For starters, it is the first speech made by the new president, and even though the public may have been listening all along, this is the speech that foreign leaders, political organizers, lobbyists, and legislators themselves listen to very closely. The establishment in Washington tends to take an inaugural more seriously than the average citizen in terms of setting the tone of the administration. And, oh, yeah so do foreign leaders.
I mentioned in the last post that this address may look like Kennedy’s with a call to service or like Reagan’s with a general sense of united courage. I said that it probably wouldn’t look like FDR’s in 1933. Here is why. All we seem to remember is the “fear itself” line. But the real power in the speech came from an often forgotten piece. Take a look:
Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.
Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failures and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
True, they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money.
Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored conditions. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.
FDR summarized his moment in history perfectly. We are in a similar situation. In fact, you could take FDR’s words and place them right in context of our time. Obama could almost copy and paste if we wanted to. But here’s the catch: for all that FDR did to actualize his agenda, this fiery populist rhetoric hurt him badly in his first 100 days. In fact, FDR is remembered by PoliSci professors as the Mohammed Ali of presidents in that he accomplished what he did without being able to perform in his prime. His first 100 days were not all that successful. Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s main speechwriter, once said that he regretted this speech because it put political handcuffs on the administration from the get go.
The first term of a presidency is effectively 18 months long. A new president gets a honeymoon period that lasts about 3 months (this is where the 100 days paradigm comes from). After that, he already has to think midterm elections, then all of a sudden he’s running for office again.
Yes, this is a big moment. No, it is not merely symbolic. The bar for this speech is set particularly high, and frankly Obama will probably not live up to these lofty expectations. The one thing we can count on is that Obama will not risk squandering any of his most effective time by politicizing his inaugural.
