For one day, for one hour, let us take a bow as a country. Nearly 233 years after our founding, 144 years after the close of our Civil War and 46 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, this crazy quilt of immigrants called Americans finally elected a black man, Barack Hussein Obama, as president.
Walking back from the inauguration, I saw an African-American street vendor wearing a home-stenciled T-shirt that pretty well captured the moment — and then some. It said: “Mission Accomplished.”
But we cannot let this be the last mold we break, let alone the last big mission we accomplish. Now that we have overcome biography, we need to write some new history — one that will reboot, revive and reinvigorate America. That, for me, was the essence of Obama’s inaugural speech and I hope we — and he — are really up to it.
Indeed, dare I say, I hope Obama really has been palling around all these years with that old Chicago radical Bill Ayers. I hope Obama really is a closet radical.
Not radical left or right, just a radical, because this is a radical moment. It is a moment for radical departures from business as usual in so many areas. We can’t thrive as a country any longer by coasting on our reputation, by postponing solutions to every big problem that might involve some pain and by telling ourselves that dramatic new initiatives — like a gasoline tax, national health care or banking reform — are too hard or “off the table.” So my most fervent hope about President Obama is that he will be as radical as this moment — that he will put everything on the table.
President Obama will have to decide just how many fences he can swing for at one time: grand bargains on entitlement and immigration reform? A national health care system? A new clean-energy infrastructure? The nationalization and repair of our banking system? Will it be all or one? Some now and some later? It is too soon to say.
But I do know this: While a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so too is a great politician, with a natural gift for oratory, a rare knack for bringing people together, and a nation, particularly its youth, ready to be summoned and to serve.
Thomas L. Friedman is a New York Times columnist.
Obama to America: Time to grow up
Wondering if his publisher liked the manuscript of “Les Miserables,” Victor Hugo sent a terse note: “?” His publisher replied as tersely: “!” That was the nation’s response to Barack Obama’s inaugural address, even though — or perhaps because — one of his themes, delicately implied, was that Americans do not just have a problem, they are a problem.
“The time has come,” he said pointedly, “to set aside childish things.” Things, presumably, such as the pandemic indiscipline that has produced a nation of households as overleveraged as is the government from which the householders insistently demand more goods and services than they are willing to pay for. “We remain,” the president said, “a young nation.” Which, even if true, would be no excuse for childishness. And it is not true. The United States is older, as a national polity, than Germany or Italy, among many others.
Obama’s first words — “I stand here today humbled by the task before us” — echoed the first paragraph of the first inaugural address, George Washington’s. Obama’s presidency begins as an exercise in psychotherapy for a nation suffering a crisis of confidence. But neither the nation nor the government that accurately represents it is constructed for consensus. And he will be unable to fault his office for his frustrations because, more than any predecessor except the first, the 44th president enters office with the scope of its powers barely circumscribed by law, and even less by public opinion.
Obama’s unprecedented power derives from the astonishing events of the last four months that have made indistinct the line between public and private sectors. Neither the public as currently alarmed, nor Congress as currently constituted, nor the Constitution as currently construed is an impediment to hitherto unimagined executive discretion in allocating vast portions of the nation’s wealth.
Obama, whose trumpet never sounds retreat, overstated the scale of our difficulties with his comparison of them with those the nation faced in the almost extinguishing winter of 1776-77. Still, the lyrics of cultural traditionalism with which he ended — the apostle of “change we can believe in” urging the nation to believe in “old” values — reinforced his theme of responsibility, summoning the nation up from childishness.
George F. Will is a Washington Post columnist.
A chance to rescue U.S. role in the world
At Madame Tussauds wax museum in Amsterdam, the figure of President Bush with bags packed has already been placed outside the building, while a waxen Barack Obama watches through a window.
The symbolism is clear: Much of the world eagerly awaits the change of U.S. administration.
Nowhere is that change needed more urgently than in the Middle East.
The arrival of Obama provides a brief window in which a serious peace process might get restarted. He will have to use all his smarts and charisma to restore hope for change in the region and dispel suspicions he’s biased.
He must convince skeptical Palestinians and Israelis that Mideast peace isn’t a mirage, so they’ll vote for peacemakers in upcoming elections. He must also persuade members of Congress not to interfere.
Some of the best advice on how to proceed is offered in a small book called “Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East” by Daniel Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky (read excerpts at www.usip.org). Kurtzer, a former peace negotiator and U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel, is on Obama’s short list to become a top Middle East adviser, and I hope he gets the job.
The pair stress that the president must make clear to Americans why Arab-Israeli peacemaking is a priority in a post-9/11 world. Rather than the passivity of the last eight years, the U.S. role should be proactive. It should aim for a final settlement and not get caught up in incremental steps.
The United States should involve other regional and international players in the process, backing Israel-Syria talks, for example, which were long opposed by the Bush team. And U.S. officials must press Israel to meet its commitments, like freezing settlement-building, even as they press Palestinians to cease violence.
Most crucial, the president must be fully behind any policies pursued by his secretary of state or special Mideast emissaries. Despite his full plate, this process won’t move without him.
There’s still a chance to rescue Mideast policy from eight years of fumbles, and Obama can’t afford to miss that chance.
Trudy Rubin is a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist.
Thomas L. Friedman is a New York Times columnist.
