Agree to Disagree–Inaugural Reaction

This month’s “Agree to Disagree” is up now on Richmond.com. The topic is Obama’s Inaugural Address.

Instant Inaugural Address Reaction

It’s fashionable in some quarters to caution against getting too excited about the ascendancy to power of Barack Obama. Some hard core conservatives still mock Obama’s progressive idealism, while at the other end of the spectrum some on left activists are already convinced Obama is just a re-branding of American imperialism.

The skeptics and cynics should have been at Boaz and Ruth Tuesday morning as Obama took the oath of office. The North Side community development organization, which focuses on training, life skills, and job placement for recently released prisoners, sponsored a special luncheon at its diner Fire House 15 on Meadowbridge Road. The gathered crowd—white and black, young and old—cheered when it was announced (at high noon) that Obama was now the president, cheered again after the oath of office, again during the speech, and once more after Joseph Lowery’s benediction.

For the crowd at Boaz and Ruth, this was an unambiguous moment of hope and promise that this country might change its direction and become something different in the new century.

But what is it we are to become? For the skeptics have a point: not everything can, will or should change at once. In four and eight years America will still be country that spends vast billions on the military, that still has vast differences in life opportunity between the best-off and the least-off, that still burns too many fossil fuels and releases too much carbon into the atmosphere.

Moreover, in the normal course of events, gridlock and delay are the rules of American politics. This is particularly the case with respect to progressive legislation that aims to contain or challenge powerful private interests. Getting any kind of meaningful health care bill passed, for instance, remains a monumental political challenge. Generally speaking, the capacity of liberal reform to re-shape or alter long-term trends towards greater social inequality is limited.

And yet, due to the variety of crises we face and the public’s hunger for a new approach, the forces of the status quo at this moment are unusually weak. Prospects for passing meaningful progressive reform legislation is now higher that any time since the Congressional session of 1965-66 (in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win in 1964). As Obama reminded us Tuesday, nothing is a given, but the opportunity is there to undertake a substantial shift in direction.

Two phrases from Tuesday’s speech stood out for me as indicators of what that shift in direction might look like. The first was Obama’s remark that the strength of our economy is not to be judged simply on the size of the GDP but “on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart.” In the context of an economy in which living standards for persons in the bottom half of the income distribution have stagnated or declined for some 35 years, even as the GDP has grown and grown, that was an important comment to make—one with radical implications, if it were taken seriously.

Extending “the reach of our prosperity” to every “willing heart” should mean supporting and expanding programs like Boaz and Ruth in every neighborhood in Richmond and every neighborhood in America, not simply handing over billions to failed corporate banks. Better yet, it should mean linking a serious effort to rebuild our decaying urban infrastructure with a serious effort to provide good jobs capable of supporting families and stabilizing communities.

The second phrase was Obama’s charge that “we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders,” a comment coupled with a commitment to help the world’s poorer countries “nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.” The notion that America has a positive moral obligation to assist the billions of fellow human beings living in or near poverty conditions has never been particularly popular among the American public—partly because of “indifference” and partly out of the view that we should help our own first.

But Obama’s statement makes the case that a greater degree of justice at home and movement towards a different relationship with the world can and must go hand in hand. Again, this is a bold claim—if we take it seriously. In reading through Obama’s books in recent weeks, I’ve frequently wondered whether the president still has the same burning desire for social justice evidence in those books, and worried about whether the realities of power politics will dampen or even extinguish the impulses which propelled him into public life in the first place.

Obama’s Inaugural Address, even its rhetorical restraint, provides clear evidence that the passion for justice and commitment to serious social change—on a local, national, and global scale– is still there. To change the way we think about what counts as a successful economy and what a just relationship with the rest of the world is a big deal, and a tall order for any President. But Obama has placed the markers down for all to see of his intent to do just that. In the process he has provided a clear standard for evaluating the success of his presidency. That standard is not one based merely on approval ratings or even winning re-election—but on whether his administration can act consistently and effectively in support of the goals Obama laid out clearly on Tuesday: not just to tackle and solve the urgent problems at hand, but to change who we are as nation.