President Obama Misses Mark with World Press with Inauguration Address

I thought that President Obama's inauguration address was fine. It stated the obvious in regards to our current economic crisis, gave an appropriate amount of praise to the fact that the United States has elected its first African American President and set the tone for a bi-partisan based hope for the future. However, it was definitely not his best effort in regards to providing his special brand of hollow hope. And, I would also suspect that it probably didn't hit hard enough on what the left considers the failings of the Bush administration (They would have probably enjoyed an old fashion lynching after the speech). Further, he average speech ( on the Obama scale) probably began to set the stage for the inevitable realization by many of devote left that Obama is just another President and he is not the second coming and he is not going to lead anyone to the promised land. And, the best that any of us can hope for is that he is going to somehow develop and implement an economic policy that will subdue our raging economic crisis and not get us into too much more trouble on the international scene.

An excellent example of how the world is viewing our new president can be found in a January 20, 2009 post on the Telegraph Blog by Alex Spillius, titled, "Barack Obama inauguration: his worst speech". Whether or not Alex is being fair or not is up to you to decide. However, it appears that for most part, the honeymoon is already over. The full text of Mr. Spillius's post is as follows:

QUITE a day, but not much of speech unfortunately. Obama got where he is by speechifying, but this effort would not have won him many votes. It was his worst on a grand stage, though still better than most politicians could muster.

The delivery, as ever, was first class, but the message was wasn't clear enough and the language not insufficiently inspiring.

As soon as the applause had died down, an African American standing man near me on the Mall said to his friend: "I thought the speech was shit." Another woman said, correctly, that "we had heard it all before at other events".

In a way Obama was a victim of his own success. Having given so many dynamic speeches he had set his own bar very high. What he tried to do at his inauguration was tell Americans that they had to sacrifice to make gains, while making them believe this was well within their capabilities. The emphasis on sacrifice was too weak however.

To the disappointment of many black people in the crowd, he also made but one reference to the enormity of a black man occupying the White House for the first time. Obama has never laboured the issue of his race, but on this historic day the issue needed more.

Jon Favreau, his co-writer, recently admitted that he had been pouring over previous inaugural speeches. That might have been a bad idea. Obama seemed weighed down by the past, and failed to seize the moment.