For many of us, tomorrow's inauguration of Barack Obama is the fulfillment of a promise implicitly made at the 2004 Democratic Convention. By the time Obama had completed the keynote address you just knew that he would be president someday. Tuesday is the day.
He is a writer who is also a politician and no Inaugural Address since JFK's has been awaited with such high expectations. It's like hearing that your favorite author's new book will be in the stores this week--you lay a strategy for purchase and all other things become secondary. Only those anticipated golden words matter right now. In a few hours Obama's Inaugural words will be in our ears and in our hands and we will decide, over some time, how much of them to mix into our lives and future. If his past is prologue, they will mean very much to us and to the world as the 21st Century unfolds.
The next few days will pop like champagne corks as President Obama
makes it emphatic that the sad sag of the last eight years is being powerfully resisted by a new generation of Americans. As a dear European lady I used to know would put it, we must "make attention,"
this is important.
A couple of years ago Barack Obama attended an event--a funeral, I think--and Ethel Kennedy was there. She said to him, "the torch is in your hands now," and he said to her, "I know."
1 comment:
I remember thinking after the 2004 Democratic Convention speech that Barack Obama was going to be the man. I wrote to a friend saying, "two words - Barack Obama," by which I meant the future of the party.
Unbelievable. However, I don't expect the man to walk on water or perform political miracles.
Good government is all I ask for. A little competence and thoughtfulness - and I'm confident we're going to get at least that.
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