WASHINGTON: If you’re not one of the lucky 240,000 ticket holders to Obama’s swearing-in, you can still feel as though you’re part of the inaugural celebration.
Tickets for the bleacher seats along the parade route sold out in less than an hour, but TV coverage is going to be better than what anyone can see at the Mall, due to security restrictions, and will be widely available on all the mainstream television channels.
As for America’s next president, Barack Obama’s trim shoulders don’t seem big enough to bear the weight he’ll take on when he’s sworn in tomorrow as the nation’s 44th president.
He’s inherited a deep recession, two wars, and global threats such as the Israeli-Palestinian debacle. (A top aide to Obama, David Axelrod, said yesterday that everyone is hopeful that the Israeli-Gaza cease-fire lasts, adding that events around the world demand that Obama act quickly, which he intends to do once he takes office.)
As America’s first African-American president, he carries the hopes of generations that the country can attain racial equality. Not so long ago black slaves were sold on the Mall and were used to build the White House.
Tomorrow’s event will not be just another transfer of power. Obama, 47, will assume all of the above as the leader of a younger generation.
“This is the first post-Vietnam leadership; it truly is a new generation,” Gleaves Whitney, director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University, told reporters.
Obama is hardly the first president to come into office amid crisis or inflated expectations. Three others, Whitney said, stand out: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
Washington, he said, had rock-star status and bore the expectations of the new, lone republic in a world of monarchies.
Lincoln would be called on to hold that republic together through the Civil War. Roosevelt would tackle the worst economic crisis in US history and take the nation into World War II.
Still, Obama’s inauguration is infused with extraordinary urgency, as the nation is clearly in crisis.
National polls suggest that Obama is more popular than ever. The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released yesterday indicates that most Americans see Obama’s inauguration as a chance for the nation to come together.
While President George W. Bush is leaving office with just 22 percent of Americans offering a favorable view of how he handled the eight years of his presidency, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll, a full 79 percent are optimistic about the next four years under Obama.
Expectations for Obama’s speech tomorrow are also quite high. The CNN poll said 85 percent predict his speech will be excellent or good. That’s 24 points higher than the 61 percent who felt the same way about Bush’s first inauguration speech in 2001.
Nine out of 10 African-Americans questioned in the CNN poll say Obama’s election is a dream come true.
Virtually every African-American in the survey says it is likely he or she will watch the ceremonies on TV. Fifty-seven percent of whites say they are likely to do the same.
