Did Daddy Deliver?
By SusanUnPC on January 21, 2009 at 4:00 PM in Current Affairs, Inauguration Day, Obama Administration
Apparently Obama’s girls think daddy did well! (Pretty darn cute!)
But the grown-ups? Oh, their reactions are all over the map. First things first: Here’s the New York Times’s interactive page about the speech with both video and transcript.
Timothy Egan writes for the New York Times, in “Man In A Hurry“:
He seemed to stumble, just for an instant, in the gallop to get over the threshold during the transfer of power, after Chief Justice Roberts flubbed the words of the most powerful paragraph in the land.
Taking the oath of office on Lincoln’s leather-bound bible, in a capital partially built by slaves, Barack Obama was a man in a hurry in an hour of peril. In that spirit, he was a man who had already memorized a few lines that another had not.
Thus, he moved quickly, in an 18-minute speech, to the theme that will carry or break the new president: sacrifice. The easy, the lazy, the days of quick riches and shortcuts, of excuses personal and political – over, he declared.
Now, for more reactions from across the board. First up is Bush’s former speech writer, then comes a gushing Chuck Schumer:
First, a bit more from Egan, who writes great non-fiction books, by the way. His latest, which won the National Book Award, was on the great Dust Bowl, another catastrophic American experience that never gets mentioned nearly as often as the Great Depression:
All great speeches, in their essence, are big stories, crafting an American narrative. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as Joan Didion said. And to govern.
As a writer and creator of a family narrative that allowed him to live with a unique background, Obama knows this. So there was no laundry list of policies to come. And almost no mention of that most overused of personal pronouns – I. …
Read all: “Man In A Hurry.”
I am not always a fan of Drudge, but this image was startling — at first, I thought it was an image of some third-world country disaster.
And Drudge asks, “NOW WHAT?”
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
