Obama: new optimism

Editorial

Success in politics frequently depends on lowering expectations and then exceeding them. When President George W. Bush cedes to President Barack Obama on Tuesday, the United States will transition from a president who has been the greatest disappointment of the living generation to one who is invested with perhaps the greatest hope.

The catastrophic economic conditions may have lowered overall expectations for the next president, but it remains difficult to see how Obama will convince Americans four years from now that he is the same near-deity they elected last November in a fit of hope and desperate optimism. Still, Obama is special, if only because he has exceptional abilities at communicating with crowds.

The themes that we hear in Tuesday's inaugural address are the themes that will dominate American – and, therefore, Canadian and much of the world's – discourse for the coming decade or longer. The words of Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural in 1933 continue to resonate, in one way or another, to this day. They will almost certainly resonate in the address on Tuesday by the new president who, facing inauspicious conditions inherited from the preceding administration, has drawn parallels with the man who promised a new deal.

Obama has shown a capability for uniting, even though we may not yet recognize it in action. Obama infuriated some of his most fervent core supporters by inviting Rick Warren, the mega-church minister who opposes women's reproductive choice and full equality for gays and lesbians, to participate in the inaugural celebration. But Obama's defence was that he is emphasizing that which Warren and he share in common, downplaying that which divides them. Because Americans have experienced eight years of deliberate exploitation of social divisions for political gain, this plain truth will take getting used to.

If Obama proves a true uniter (remember, the current president promised, "I'm a uniter, not a divider") and somehow succeeds at communicating a message in which Americans can find the hope to inspire themselves, once again, as individuals and as a nation, to greatness, that may be enough to qualify his presidency as a success.

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