11 February 2013
Barack Obama's second inaugural
President Obama was sworn in for a second term in late January and delivered the traditional inaugural address. It can be read at that link, or seen on video here.
There has been plenty of commentary on the speech and what it means for American politics in the next several years. One point of disagreement among commentators is whether the speech represents a manifesto for a renewed "liberalism" or not. In The New Republic magazine (generally liberal, but with a diverse group of writers), Alan Brinkley suggests that it does. But writing in the same magazine, Michael Kazin takes a different view, pointing out various "festering failures of politics and policy" that Obama seems to recognize but isn't really promising to do much about.
Both those writers are liberals and probably Obama supporters themselves. Conservatives, Republicans and opponents of Obama, of course, disagree even more sharply with the president and for different reasons.
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Here's a further interesting item about the speech, from a former presidential speechwriter -- a look at the way it echoed or "alluded" to other famous American political speeches (from Lincoln, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, etc.):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2013/01/obamas-inaugural-allusions.html