12 Ways Obama Smacked Down the Right in
His Inauguration Speech
President
Barack Obama gives his inauguration address during the presidential
public swearing-in on the west front of the Capitol Building during the
57th inauguration in Washington, Jan. 21, 2013. (Photo: Chang W. Lee /
The New York Times) Reclaiming the language of
patriotism, Obama then threw it back in the faces of right-wing
Republicans to advance a liberal agenda.
With its elegant rendering of the liberal agenda before the eyes of
the American people, President Barack Obama's second inaugural address
was music to the ears of many a progressive. But to the ears of Tea
Partiers and the Republican right, this inauguration speech, as well as
the ceremony that surrounded it, was war -- not just a war of words, but
a war of prayer, a war of poetry and even, perhaps, a war of song.
Driving the message home were the hands of the Fates, who conspired
to see the second inauguration of the nation’s first African American
president fall on Martin Luther King Day, the national holiday whose
very creation was opposed by so many who still today comprise the
Republican Party’s right wing.
Here we recount a dozen ways in which the president brought his fight
to the right, in no uncertain terms, at his second inauguration.
1. Reminding the nation who won the Civil War.
On the eve of Obama's second inauguration, civil rights leader Julian
Bond addressed a crowd of progressives gathered in Washington, D.C., at
the Peace Ball convened by the activist restauranter Andy Shallal, Amy
Goodman of Democracy Now!, and a host of progressive entities. Bond
spelled out the statistics of Obama's 2012 victory for the crowd, noting
that Mitt Romney's voters were almost entirely white, and that the only
states won by the Republican presidential candidate belonged to the old
Confederacy.
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the anthem of Union troops in the
Civil War, long ago passed into the songbook of patriotic themes, and
has been played during the inaugural parades of other presidents, sung
on several different occasions by the very white Mormon Tabernacle
Choir. But when the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, in all its multicultural
glory, was tapped to sing the anthem not from a parade stand, but from
the ceremonial podium, a different chord was struck, thanks to its
context: the invocation that preceded it, and the president's speech,
which followed it.
2. Reminding the nation of the history of the civil rights movement. The
significance of the president’s first musical selection could easily be
dismissed, had it not been for the fact of how it was bookended: on the
front end, the invocation by Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of the slain
civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, and afterward by the president’s own speech, in which he acknowledged the nation’s history of slavery. From the invocation by Evers-Williams:
One hundred-fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years after the March on Washington, we celebrate the spirit of our ancestors, which has allowed us to move from a nation of unborn hopes and a history of disenfranchised votes, to today’s expression of a more perfect union.
Near the beginning of the president’s own address were these lines:
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.
3. Reclaiming the founding documents for liberalism. The
president didn’t waste any time plucking the heartstrings of the Tea
Party movement, citing both the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence in the opening paragraph of his inaugural address. It was
from the latter that he got the most mileage, beginning with his recitation of the Declaration’s opening strains:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.
Hear that, Messrs. Koch? Did ya catch that mob thing, Tea Partiers?
4. Throwing right-wing rhetoric right back at ‘em. In
most political contests, a good political consultant will tell her
client never to repeat the opposition’s framing of you. But, as the
nation’s first black president, Obama finds himself in a position like
no other. To ignore the rhetoric of the right as it is deployed against
him lends a sort of cover to the racism that is often implicit in it --
or the simplistic ridiculousness of it all. When Obama, as he has since
his re-election, acknowledges and, yes, even repeats that language, he
lets the rest of America know that he’s in on the joke, and he thinks
it’s a pretty lame joke.
So that line about “the tyranny of a king”? Yeah, that was for the
wing-nuts who paint the president as a tyrant in order to justify their
call for his overthrow or the overthrow of the U.S. government. Later in
the address, Obama, defending the social safety net, took on the
right’s “producerism” trope, heard from pundits and politicians
throughout Rightlandia, that America is populated by two kinds of
people, “the takers” versus “the makers”. (Remember that "47 percent"
video?)
The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.
And Ayn Rand wept.
5. Actually, you really didn’t build that. During
the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney and his allies tried to make
hay of Obama’s poorly crafted defense of government projects and
collective action. In fact, Romney devoted an entire day of the
Republican National Convention to refuting a straw man of an idea that
Obama never stated, claiming that the president said small business
owners were not truly the builders of their businesses. What the
president actually said was that the success of small businesses
depended, as well, on things the individual could not provide: roads,
bridges and a public education system.
In his inauguration speech, Obama showed he’s not backing down from that claim, no matter how hard the right may try to misconstrue it:
Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.
No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.
6. Tearing von Mises to pieces. Right-wing
leaders -- as well as Wall Street bankers, industrial polluters,
processed-food producers, and any number of one-percenters -- have their
resentful followers believing that there’s no such thing as a good
government regulation. Much of their reasoning is found in what is known
as the Austrian school of economics, notably in the work of Ludwig von
Mises and Frederick Hayek. With a single sentence, Obama dismissed that
entire branch of quackonomics with the back of his hand:
Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.
7. Calling out the climate-change deniers with a call to action. In
a speech as concise as the president’s second inaugural, the paragraph
he devoted to climate change is significant. Not only did the president
call for the U.S. to take the lead in battling climate change, in part
through the development of new technologies, he also smacked down any
doubters (such as, one might imagine, those inculcated to doubt by the
many right-wing enterprises funded by energy barons Charles and David
Koch):
Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.
8. Spanish is the loving tongue, amigos. After a
long jihad against Spanish-speaking Americans, right-wing Republicans
are reaping their just rewards, left with the impossible task of
electing their next president without Latino votes, or doing an
about-face on their anti-immigrant policies. In the 2012 presidential
election, Latino turnout was the highest it’s ever been, and nearly all
of those Latinos voted for Barack Obama. They were rewarded by the sight
of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic to sit on the Supreme
Court, conducting the oath of office ceremony for Vice President Joe
Biden, as well as a poem presented by Richard Blanco, the son of Cuban immigrants, and a benediction, partly delivered in Spanish, by Luis Leon, a priest who came to the U.S. as a Cuban refugee.
And in his speech, Obama did not disappoint those who seek entry to America, whether from Latin America or elsewhere:
Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.
9. Making the moral, patriotic case for the social safety net and against poverty. As
mentioned in item #4, Obama made a strong case for maintaining Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid as government programs. Using the
timeworn opening phrase of the Constitution’s preamble, he wove that
case into a broader argument for collective action, care for the greater
community and the fulfillment of the ideal of equality, as asserted in
the Declaration of Independence:
We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.
[...]
For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.
10. Asserting the moral imperative of gay rights. Although
the right has succeeded in suppressing the rights of women and people
of color, it’s widely acknowledged that in this regard, the right is on
the wrong side of history. So when, in a line of great rhetorical
flourish, Obama equated a famous gay rebellion against New York City
police at a Greenwich Village bar with an iconic civil rights march and a
catalyzing moment in the quest for women’s suffrage, he essentially
said to his opponents: Your campaign against LGBT people is immoral.
Here’s the line from the second inaugural address that’s destined for
immortality:
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall... Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
Alas, transgender people, it seems, will continue to wait for their day.
11. Calling for equal pay for women. I know -- not
very controversial, right? Well, if you’re a right-winger, it’s a stick
in the eye. Remember the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the first piece of
legislation signed by President Obama? That’s the law that lifted a
statute of limitations on bringing suit against an employer who was
found to have evaded fair pay laws. The Tea Party had only begun to
coalesce at the point, but Republicans were already sufficiently
anti-woman to vote against it. In fact, only eight Republicans voted for
it. Here’s Obama’s call, from the inaugural speech:
[O]ur journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.
12. Shining a light on voter suppression. Among the
many ugly things for which the 2012 election campaigns will be
remembered, foremost among them is the bald-faced attempts by Republican
officials to suppress and subvert the votes of Democrats --
particularly, the votes of African Americans, Latinos and young people.
In his victory speech on November 7, Obama spoke specifically to that
problem, saying it needed fixing. Today, in his high-minded inaugural
address, the president raised the issue once again, saying:
Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.
* * *
It was a great speech. But rhetoric is easy, especially for a
president so gifted in the art of oratory. Left on the table are
questions, such as: What do you mean when you say you want to “save”
Social Security? Or “reform” education? Or end the wars in which our
nation has been mired for so long?
For all that the president had to say to the Tea Party and its allies
in Congress and in the states, perhaps the most important thing is
what he said to the rest of us. It amounted to the story about Franklin
D. Roosevelt, when he told a progressive ally who wanted him to do
something controversial: “Make me do it.”
What Obama said to progressives was this:
You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course.
You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.
Time to start shouting.
