Fox News turned to industrial-strength blowhard Charles Krauthammer for succour after U.S. president Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural address.
"Not memorable - there's not a line here that will ever be repeated but I think very important historically because this was really Obama unbound," harrumphed Krauthammer.
It was a challenging speech, in its restraint, tone and content - the applause from the crowd this time was a little more hesitant as people paused to digest just what the president said. While the president didn't wave a little red book, it was a serving of Chicago-style, deep-dish, grey-dog liberalism; a stern, defiant, unbowed, unapologetic testimonial to moderate left-wing values, if such a thing is possible.
This was Obama throwing the punch that Ali didn't to end the Rumble in Jungle, driving a prone Romney and Ryan into the canvas after the bell; it was, as a playwright friend of mine once wrote, like Jesus saying I'm tired of turning the other cheek.
While most of the speech was a tacit rebuke to the mixed-nut fringe of the Republican right, the crux of his address felt more like a chiding of the champagne socialist left:
"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 the 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."
If the last four years have shown the president anything, it's that the right's bankrupt and barren ideas won't just wither away as better angels endure; they must be constantly crushed and discarded, word by word, line by line, day after day.
The president then answered his own call. This was America's first black president speaking on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with close friends of the great man in the audience and the wife of one of his fallen comrades giving prayer. So Barack Obama took one of King's promissory notes and asked that it be honoured.
He first talked of Stonewall, in reference to the 1969 New York riots that helped spur the gay and lesbian rights movement. Then he said this ushered in a new era of civil society:
"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 than surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well."
A president had said the word gay in the National Mall in front of 600,000-odd people and the only discernible effect was his hair was greyer than it was four years ago. That must have sent social conservatives rushing to their bibles so they could wash their ears out with soap.
It was chest-thumping, but it was the chest-thumping of a linebacker showing blitz or a guard about to drive the lane. This was the president saying to his opponents, "I'm coming. And you're not going to stop me this time or the next."
The bravado, however,was problematic and a little terrifying.
The president's stance is understandable - the implacable idiots of the right are like Algerian terrorists insofar as they see negotiation as a means of exploiting weakness and only understand force. But the U.S. is approaching a trio of fiscal standoffs - on March 1, regarding automatic spending cuts; on March 27, regarding a budgetary resolution; and sometime in April over extending the debt ceiling. A mistake in any of those could send the world back into recession; long-term, failing to deal with the deficit will just add to the $16 trillion in American debt that is single biggest current threat to global stability.
Thankfully, the president left himself some room to manuever, talking about hard choices to reduce the size of the deficit. More importantly, he showed how he's not above employing subtlety and an oblique approach when necessary. One could argue the president spent much of the speech talking about gun control while not using either word once in the whole address. He managed to cleverly state his case for better laws while not letting the entire debate bog down his administration or stoke a paranoid panic that would have every AR-15 and every round of 7.62mm ammunition snapped off store shelves across the continental United States.
He managed to say the Second Amendment was a dangerous anachronism by wrapping it in the larger theme of his address: that the ideas and values that make the United States such a dynamic force must be replenished or they will become corrupted.
Krauthammer's image of Obama unbound is actually quite apt in this and strangely beautiful; it references the titan Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for eternity and had his liver eaten by an eagle every day as punishment for stealing fire from the gods and gifting it to man. In some stories he is unbound, freed by Hercules; he either reconciles himself with the gods or overthrows them.
It's a good metaphor for Obama's first term: he was bound by the decisions of George W. Bush, two wars, a horrifying economic crisis and re-election.
Now he's free, somewhat, to reshape America like Prometheus did, with fire, from top to bottom, burning when he must and forging what he can.
