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WASHINGTON - Inaugural addresses are usually flowery and grandiose, idealistic and sometimes triumphalist.
Barack Obama's yesterday had its share of soaring language, as one would expect from one of the most accomplished orators of the age. But in almost every other respect it was different. It was
pragmatic. It was realistic. It pulled no punches. In a single word, it was hard.
"If you play it straight with them, if you explain to them ... then the American people will rise up to the challenge," the 44th President promised last week.
Yesterday, in a speech of 18 minutes, he delivered. He spoke of "a collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age". The time had come, he told a spoiled country, "to put away childish things". And he delivered a specific repudiation of his predecessor's policies that signalled not so much a transition as a transformation.
He started with the customary thanks to the outgoing President George W. Bush for his service - but there politeness ended. The time "of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions" was over, Obama declared, in unmistakable criticism of Bush's laissez faire domestic policies.
On foreign and national security policies, he was even more explicit. In a clear condemnation of torture, he rejected the notion there was a choice between "our safety and our ideals". He noted that "power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please". In other words, the arrogant unilateralism that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a thing of the past.
Inaugurals often borrow from their predecessors. In this case, Obama's address echoed some of the themes expounded on an even colder January day in 1961 by John F. Kennedy. Americans had "duties to ourselves, to our nation and the world", he proclaimed in words that recalled JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country".
Few such speeches can have been less ideological. There were no Bush-like promises to "end tyranny in the world", no paeans to the liberating virtues of untrammelled markets. The tone was unrelentingly pragmatic.
Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem, while Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over. For Obama, the question yesterday "is not whether our Government is too big or too small, but whether it works".
At times he was astonishingly blunt. "Swill" is not a word that normally features in an inaugural - but it did yesterday, when this first black President spoke of the "bitter swill of civil war and segregation".
No inaugural is complete without historical references. But the one Obama chose was not victory in world wars, or the triumph over Communism. Instead, he spoke of Valley Forge in 1777, the darkest moment of the war of independence, when the capital, Philadelphia, had fallen to the British, and George Washington took his demoralised half-starved men to winter in the empty countryside.
In the next few months, he turned that ramshackle force into the army which would ultimately win the war. That is the struggle Obama offered his country - as near a call to blood, sweat, toil and tears as will be heard in the richest country on Earth, in an inaugural that will be remembered not so much for its oratory, nor even that the man who delivered it was black, but for its honesty.
- INDEPENDENT