Obligatory inaugural post
Everybody in my office stopped working and stood around the monitor watching it streaming online, and cheered after the swearing-in.
It's funny though, I didn't experience that sense of breathless jubilation and awe at the weight of history that was so palpable the night of the election and in his acceptance speech. During his inaugural address I finally figured out that what I was feeling more than anything else was sorry for him. Weird, eh?
I was thinking about presidents I've seen sworn in, and then watched how the weight of the office has aged them virtually overnight. You can already see the accelerated aging on him since the beginning of the campaign. And the weight of responsibility hadn't even been laid on him yet. The White House seems to chew people up and I was thinking about his young vibrant wife and young kids and what it will be like to be them, watching him rapidly become an old man, burning his life down in service to his country.
Then I was also thinking about Obama-mania and that makes me feel sorry for him too. He's in for it from all sides, you know. The rabid right-wing is grinding back into gear right now, looking for things to tear him down for, even if it's only that there were a lot of private jets at the inauguration. The rabid left-wing is in a delirium of fanatical devotion, and that I think is far more dangerous. I just find idolization really disturbing and always think ahead to the time when surely Obama will fail in some way to meet the ideal that has been built up around him, or his works are imperfect because he will have to struggle with entrenched interests to make anything happen, and then what? There are bound to be inadequacies. He is inheriting a particularly ugly set of problems both resulting from this moment in history and from the asshattery of the previous administration. I have hope in Obama too, but I am just afraid people are hoping for too much, and will blame him when they don't get it.
But it's a good day and I'm so glad we are done with the Bush era.
That is, assuming Jeb doesn't run in 2012, Gods preserve us. Can you imagine a president named Jeb?