President Obama Challenges Fellow Citizens
"A New Era of Responsibility"
With just brief mention of the history he personified, the new president's expressive speaking style turned from inspirational to challenging. President Obama called for Americans to look within to fix the nation’s problems and addressed the world at large with an attitude of inclusion fortified with resolve. Americans, he said, "will not apologize for our way of life" nor hesitate to defend it.
Out With The Old
According to NPR, President Obama referred to the previous administration as he condemned the "greed and irresponsibility" which weakened the nation's economy and the "collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age."
"The fact of the break is not surprising — he ran on a campaign of change," said historian Russell Riley of the University of Virginia. "But it was striking that, with his predecessor seated behind him, there were so many moments in the address where he [was] directly critical of what went before."
Fred Shapiro, a Yale University Law School librarian who edits the Yale Book of Quotations, said he found the speech "fairly eloquent.”
“In style, Obama surprisingly does not echo Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Dr. Martin Luther King, as I would have expected," Shapiro said. "Instead he finds his own voice, confident and pragmatic, only at a few points soaring rhetorically."
In With the New
President Obama spoke to Americans of unity and faith. The pundits, he said, like to slice and dice the country into "red states and blue states."
"But I've got news for them. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states."
"There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq," he said. "We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and the stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
The Road Ahead
The new president’s straightforward speech urged high standards and commitment of all Americans as he took charge of a nation jarred by recession and weary of war.
America's path to greatness, he stressed, "has not been for the fainthearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame, rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor — who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom…our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness."
Before relinquishing poetics to inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, President Obama turned to the masses, making the statement,
“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of re-making America."
Image Map of Inaugural Speech
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