So if he later wrote a puff piece, I sure missed it, and it sounds wholely out of character. Are you sure it really was by him? Seems odd you can’t now locate it etc. President Barack Obama faced straight into a hard sun, raised his right hand, took the oath of office just a few feet from where I was sitting, and then he turned and began to deliver his amazing, beautiful inaugural address.
I found it through our library's archives!
Obama spoke with words worthy of our nationChicago Tribune [IL] - Wednesday, January 21, 2009
"On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics," our new president said. "We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to put aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history."
That's when I felt that tingle in my leg.
Actually, it was my right foot tingling, not my left, and not throbbing from liberal giddiness, but because my foot was frozen. It was so cold Tuesday that my toes curled in my black oxfords like boxed shrimp in your grocer's freezer.
Yet as I listened to him, my foot got warmer, and so help me, so did the rest of me. So go ahead, accuse me of being a Hopium Eater, but it was one heck of a speech. It was clear, a thoughtful man talking, a man hoping to unite his country even as he could feel the weight of the Earth settling upon his shoulders.
"To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent," said the president, "know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."
For a second I thought he was talking about the Daley machine in Chicago, but he wasn't, and my foot started tingling again like mad.
The phrase that may be the most widely quoted is the one about the Republican-engineered security state.
"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. ... Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience' sake."
He is a natural speech giver. The media will give him a longer-than-usual honeymoon. And already he's taking care of the guys who count, his nominee for transportation secretary goes before a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday promising to spend $800 billion on concrete and asphalt.
What many of his apostles in the media refuse to understand about Obama as they heap virtues upon him before he's even governed one day, is that he rose up in Chicago politics not by challenging power but by accommodating it, and now other nations will measure his character by prodding and testing him.
Yet his speech was a success because it tapped into that identical nerve running through moderates, liberals, conservatives and libertarians: love of country. His speech clearly told us that Obama loves this nation as an immigrant's son, a kid who grew up with a funny name, a young man who accepted the American offer to reinvent himself.
There were surprises. He reached out to Muslims, something not promised so publicly by predecessors. He didn't talk only of heroes carved in marble, but of anonymous African-Americans who labored in the fields under the lash of the whip. He reminded us that years ago, his own father would have been refused service in a Washington restaurant because of the color of his skin.
I thought of all the parents watching with their children, and grandparents who worked the fields, telling the young ones to look at the president and know there are no limits to what can be achieved.
From where I was sitting, less than 100 feet from him, I turned around and looked out into the National Mall, where more than a million of our countrymen stood, compelled to witness, and I felt guilty that I was so close and they so far, in that rippling sea of believers.
Yet for all the nobility in the speech, there was some crafty politics in the bones.
"What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them -- that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply," Obama said. "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or small, but whether it works."
Clearly, those who disagree with our president about the size and reach of the federal government risk being branded as cynics. So he can mistakenly call me a cynic. But I admire the man, and his inaugural address delivered on a cold day under a clear sky, for what was at the heart of his words, his love for America and her promise.
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jskass@tribune.com