Charles Krauthammer, conservative columnist:
“I think very important historically because this this was really Obama unbound,” he said on Fox News. “And I think what’s most interesting is that Obama basically is declaring the end of Reaganism in this speech.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME):
“The speech was more of a campaign style speech than I expected,” Collins told the New York Times after the ceremony. “Maybe it’s just the final stage of the campaign, and now we can all get down to governing.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):
“It was a fine speech, but I didn’t hear any conciliatory remarks,” McCain told the Times. “I didn’t see any specific reference like, ‘I reach out my hand to the other side of the aisle.’
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/reaction-obama-second-inaugural-address.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Yes, no question, McCain isn't wrong here: there weren't any conciliatory remarks. Darrell Issa also noticed this and was not pleased:
"The words were code for a progressive agenda. I’m hoping that the president will recognize that compromise should have been the words for today, and they clearly weren’t,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a frequent Obama critic who has zealously pursued a contempt case against Attorney General Eric Holder."
“We were hoping that he would use this day to reach out to all Americans and all parties. He clearly did not.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/republicans-fighting-words-from-obama-in-inaugural-speech-86514.html#ixzz2IfyKlWm5
Maybe the Congressman can show Obama how it's done. I mean that witchunt he's been pushing against Eric Holder is certainly conciliatory. In holding Holder in contempt-on baseless charges-he certainly shows he's willing to compromise, as is his pledge to hold a different investigation into the Administration every day.
There's no question, however, the President wasn't feeling very conciliatory which may be surprising as the GOP was so receptive to Obama's "postpartisan" Inauguration speech four years ago. Krugman also notes the absence of "postpartisan" politics in today's speech:
'Justice Scalia doesn’t seem to have been happy at today’s event. I, however, mostly was.
The truth is that I hated Obama’s first inaugural speech. To borrow a phrase from Barney Frank, it gave me a case of post-partisan depression. The new president was still thinking of himself as the man who could somehow end the political divide; and on policy substance, it was a VSP speech full of talk about hard choices and remarkably off-base at a time when highly expansionary fiscal and monetary policy were called for.'
'The second inaugural was much better. Maybe a bit lacking in poetry — but it was a clear acknowledgment that he faces an implacable, irrational opposition, together with a forceful defense of progressive values. In fact, Obama has never been this clear before about what he stands for.
What it means in terms of actual politics and policy is anyone’s guess, although my guess is not much: the GOP majority in the House will still block everything it can, and unless Democrats regain the House next year in a huge upset, that puts a lid on what can be achieved. Still, we’re starting off on the right note."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/saying-the-right-stuff/
'Justice Scalia doesn’t seem to have been happy at today’s event. I, however, mostly was.
The truth is that I hated Obama’s first inaugural speech. To borrow a phrase from Barney Frank, it gave me a case of post-partisan depression. The new president was still thinking of himself as the man who could somehow end the political divide; and on policy substance, it was a VSP speech full of talk about hard choices and remarkably off-base at a time when highly expansionary fiscal and monetary policy were called for.'
'The second inaugural was much better. Maybe a bit lacking in poetry — but it was a clear acknowledgment that he faces an implacable, irrational opposition, together with a forceful defense of progressive values. In fact, Obama has never been this clear before about what he stands for.
What it means in terms of actual politics and policy is anyone’s guess, although my guess is not much: the GOP majority in the House will still block everything it can, and unless Democrats regain the House next year in a huge upset, that puts a lid on what can be achieved. Still, we’re starting off on the right note."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/saying-the-right-stuff/
Krugman is so right. I too much preferred today's Obama and I also agreed with Clinton during the campaign when he suggested he held this year's Obama in higher regard than the 2008 version. Honestly I always kind of took all that hope and change stuff as rhetoric. I supported him after he beat Hillary, don't get me wrong, but all that sloganning never did much for me. I prefer this Obma, the one who's in the small club of those who have been President and his like Clinton suggests, a made man.
The only part I disagree is that not much is going to get done. This is something else that the VSP were saying-that the next 2 years are going to look a lot like the last two. How similar have they looked so far? We've already gotten the fiscal cliff deal done with taxes raised on the rich, the debt ceiling will be raised-though the GOP is still for now holding on to its gimmick about 3 months and withholding Congress' pay-and Sandy relief has been passed.
As Bill Kristol says, elections have consequences. In 2011 the President was very weak politically, at his most unpopular point in his Presidency. It's not always just the numbers. How did Reagan get so much done when he had to deal with Tip O'Neil's Democratic House for 8 years-and even lost the Senate the last 2?
The GOP will have to cave a lot more than they want to believe. Again, legislation now comes through the Senate after conferring with the White House. Then it is rammed through the House with a minority of reasonable Republicans-like those who voted for the fiscal cliff deal and Sandy relief- and an overwhelming number of Democrats-hard to believe but we're in the days of the Boehner-Pelosi alliance.
In 2011 the GOP was stronger and so they were able to employ the Hastert Rule and control the legislative process-or at least sabotage it-with just one out of the three bodies of power.
"What the administration now confronts is the issue of legacy. The accomplishments of the first term have given Obama an already exalted status among his base. But inside the White House, there is a tangible sense of hope (and, perhaps, a bit of trepidation) about what’s to come. Immigration reform, the ending of the war in Afghanistan, the protection of gay rights, the passage of gun laws, the execution of health care and banking reform, and the revamping of the tax code and social safety net are all on the docket. The means of addressing them is the great unknown.
"What Monday’s speech did, more than anything else, is provide a window into those means. This isn’t the same Obama who, upon coming into office amid an economic crisis, called for an end to the politics of division. It was a more jaded, ostensibly realistic Obama, demanding that divided politics no longer be used as an excuse for inaction and promising to not accept such a cynical status quo.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/obama-inaugural-address_n_2521206.html
As Greg Sargent says, he made the unapologetic case for liberalism while appealing to the Founding Fathers for an endorsement. However, another crucial point that he makes is that Obama's speech was in some sense Reaganesque. Recall, Krauthammer's comment that Obama's speech was declaring the end of Reaganism.
Some liberals have gone as far, at least back in 2011 when Obama bashing was at its height, to criticize Obama for reading about Reagan. Yet, this has not bee because he wants to further the Reagan Revolution but rather to stage a kind of counterrevolution against Reaganism. This is why the GOP has always hated him so much-or at least one of the key reasons. They correctly sense that he plans to be as much a transformation President as Reagan was but for liberalism, against conservatism.
"In this sense, Obama’s speech today was similar to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981. Reagan used that speech to articulate the conservative philosophy of governance and to declare the country’s turn in that direction. Obama today made the case, implicitly, that the country has now thrown in its lot with progressive governance as he defined it. Unlike Reagan, who made that declaration in his first inaugural, Obama needed to get through a tumultuous first term before having the confidence to do the same. Obama had to deal with profound domestic crises and was often rendered over-cautious by a radicalized opposition that was determined to destroy him at all costs. “Sometimes he didn’t quite get the balance,” presidential historian Stephen Hess told me today. “It’s as if he is claiming the balance now.”
"Today, Obama all but declared ideological victory. That was the hidden meaning of Obama’s frequent invocation of “we, the people” — he was effectively rooting his vision of the proper balance of individual and collective responsibility, and the need for the sort of collective action the right all-too-cavalierly denounces as tyranny, in their authority."
“This was the most philosophically clear of any of his major speeches, and one of the most expansively progressive Inaugural Addresses in decades,” Waldman told me. “And he rooted those arguments in the civic creed of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/01/21/an-expansive-case-for-progressive-governance-grounded-in-language-of-founding-fathers/
"Today, Obama all but declared ideological victory. That was the hidden meaning of Obama’s frequent invocation of “we, the people” — he was effectively rooting his vision of the proper balance of individual and collective responsibility, and the need for the sort of collective action the right all-too-cavalierly denounces as tyranny, in their authority."
“This was the most philosophically clear of any of his major speeches, and one of the most expansively progressive Inaugural Addresses in decades,” Waldman told me. “And he rooted those arguments in the civic creed of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/01/21/an-expansive-case-for-progressive-governance-grounded-in-language-of-founding-fathers/
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