What Barack Obama the new president of America needs to do - There's no mystery about what this new president needs to do. And Obama, vowing transparency in his campaign, has left little doubt about his intended means of lifting his country out of the mire, starting with an economic stimulus package that will likely exceed $1 trillion (U.S.) by the time Congress is finished with it. wow that’s lots of money; most people won’t even be able to count the zeros in trillion.
Inaugural addresses, like the Oscars, are among the most overrated of American rituals. Of 218 speeches compiled in the first edition of William Safire's Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, just six of the inaugural speeches make the cut (including both of Abraham Lincoln's).
Obama already has a chance to make another history; there have been only two great inaugurals, both by Lincoln and both at the moment of America's greatest crisis.
In 1861, Lincoln seamlessly blended logic and sentiment in an argument against the coming Civil War hostilities, evoking a spirit of renewed unity in which Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line would be touched "by the better angels of our nature" – one of the most oft-quoted phrases of any American.
On Nov. 19, 1863, the erstwhile corporate lawyer effectively rewrote America's founding documents in asserting that the Civil War had not been chiefly about slavery but the forging of a genuine democracy that embraced every American drawing breath – "that this nation, under God," in Lincoln's audacious words, "shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Obama has chosen "a new birth of freedom" as the theme for his inaugural address.
We all know John F. Kennedy committed the U.S. to a new role as global busybody:
"Let every nation know," JFK famously proclaimed in his 1961 inaugural, "whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty"
Vietnam was the price of the Kennedy Inaugural.
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