Today's festivities were a cross between Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and V-J Day, a glamorous and populous three day extravaganza that apparently cost $170 million and may even have been worth it. It also was rather imperial, wasn't it, even to the sense that the new president is exerting world leadership "again". If that made the "Little America" crowd squeamish, they have kept the groans to themselves.
Barack Obama now has an historic opportunity, for good or ill. Oddly, it is not properly an opportunity for grand gestures and revolutionary innovations. Those likely would collapse for lack of popular support--and lack of money. The opportunity is rather for pragmatism, for making the existing system work better. There are some signs, in rhetoric, but also in certain appointments (though not in others), that President Obama sees his mandate that way, too.
The new president's repeated call for bi-partisanship is really an appeal to find a large majority upon which to make moderate reform inevitable. If he keeps at it, he'll find that majority, achieve a revival of the economy and probably do great good for his party. If he opts for change that punishes the productive sectors of the economy, creates disincentives for investment in new jobs, subsidizes failure and antagonizes the mores of most Americans, he may do some good for his party in the short term, but damage it and the country in the end.
For example, if President Obama forges a coalition to reduce energy consumption, including petroleum (and especially imported petroleum), increase domestic supply and alternative sources, and lower real prices for consumers, he will prevail. You can have conservation and abundance at the same time. But if he decides to force a draconian agenda of of privation and scarcity--not to mention high cost--on the country, he will go the way of Jimmy Carter.
It could go either way.
Meanwhile, in today's events The Great Republic, which is one of the most majestic and unique creations in all of history, was on splendid display. These are the rare events of representative democracy that stun the world in admiration. From its beginning, the United States (the nation of George Washington's sentiment that Mr. Obama so beautifully evoked) has sought to perform a spectacular paradox: to enoble Everyman. That America often succeeds in doing so was fully evident in the Capital these past days.
Disillusionment may, and probably will, follow. But whose heart could not swell with good will today?
