Random thoughts:

Harold Meyerson has an excellent column today evaluating President Obama’s (ooo, that still sounds so good) inauguration speech. It echoes a lot of my own thoughts, especially this part:

“The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity but because it is the surest route to our common good.”

We measure the merit of government, he added, not by how wide a berth it gives the market but by “whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

With those words, the age of Reagan was ceremoniously but unambiguously interred. For 30 years, the widely shared prosperity created and then enjoyed by the Greatest Generation has been eroding. Obama’s speech was the first presidential inaugural to address the narrowing of American prosperity and to announce the intention to broaden it again.

The age of Bush was also ended, more abruptly, in the very first sentence that concerned foreign and defense policy. “As for our common defense,” Obama said, “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Moments later, he added, “Power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.”

With that, the neoconservative perversion of American ideals — and American security — was flushed to its reward, and a new doctrine, at once more idealistic and realistic than neoconservatism ever was, was articulated by our articulate new president.

Righties, of course, are disparaging the speech as just so much pretty rhetoric, but it was anything but. This was not a soaring, inspirational speech, but a serious one that precisely laid out the values on which Obama intends to build his administration. Let’s hope he is true to his word.

At the Guardian, Naomi Wolf also praises the speech as “sophisticated” and a marked departure from the fake optimism of recent political speech.

The great leaders in the US weren’t the cheerleaders who promised ­morning in America. They were the ones that forced us to look in the mirror. Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we’re the best, the city on the hill.

In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny. Abraham Lincoln gave speeches about the civil war in which he said, in essence, “We’ve brought this on ourselves by enslaving Americans.” Obama’s speech was a diagnosis: “We have to take steps to rebuild our nation.” I’m not saying, “Hooray, he offered a tough, dark recognition of our reality.” I’m saying “Hooray” because he has recognised that the only way to save America is to confront it.

And she’s right. Saint Ronald of Blessed Memory and the recently dethroned Dubya in particular were both all about feel-good rhetoric that didn’t actually say anything substantive. Certainly there is something to be said for holding one’s head up high, squaring one’s shoulders, sitting tall in the saddle, whatever. But a person, or a nation, needs more than good posture.

I liked this comment by Steve Kraske of the Kansas City Star:

It was, in short, an address for these times.

To reach for anything more dramatic, anything more Martin Luther King-like given the proximity to the site of the preacher’s most quoted speech, would have cast the spotlight too much on Obama, rather than the dire fix the nation is in.

Obama detractors still mock him as The One or The Messiah, but the irony is that Obama presents himself in a far less messianic way than George W. Bush did. And the difference is that Obama can see a direction. He sees what needs to be done, and he’s telling us that we all need to work together to achieve substantial change. Bush was always thumping podiums and declaring that we must be “resolved,” but he was never entirely clear what we were supposed to be resolved about except to trust him. And need I say that many of these same detractors still genuflect at the mention of Saint Ronald?

There’s a lot of petty meanness going on on the Right today, but I think I’ll ignore it. Let them stew.