- Scott Andrews Pool/AP
- President Obama after delivering his inaugural address.
Suggestions rolled in and the president had to make hard choices. Could he please everyone? Should he please everyone?
I was biased by “Saying What Matters in 701 Words,” Lincoln scholar Ronald C. White Jr.’s powerful argument in the Sunday New York Times for Obama’s keeping his second inaugural address as short and sweet as Lincoln’s. Lincoln said his 701 words and sat down, and critics have been hailing them ever since. “This year’s audience will expect Mr. Obama to detail his priorities for the next four years, from fixing the economy to reforming immigration to curbing gun violence,” White recalled. “Maybe, like Lincoln, he should surprise his audience.” He advised Obama to offer “not a lawyerly, rational address on the issues facing our nation but a president ready to share his heart. And daring to tell us how we must change.”
That sounded like just the thing. But Obama reached his 701st word in roughly the same breath with which he was saying that “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.” That smacked not only of politics but of a speech that still had a long way to go (two-thirds of it, as it turned out). And he was already done with his Lincoln channeling, having remarked early on that “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.” A sop to White! I thought. Won’t do.
