January 21, 2009
Editorial Observer
In Washington on Inauguration Day
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Washington
Four hours before the inauguration, there was enough menace in a subway crowd — a shouting throng packed together with the exits jammed — that the station master made a bad choice of announcement. “Don’t panic!” he bellowed over the public address system.
In seconds, he recovered with a brilliant follow-up, a rhythmic incanting: “O-ba-ma!” The crowd picked it up instantly. “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” Patience and celebration were restored until the crush could ease.
All the long day, it was like that. The new president’s name, simply his name, was just the restorative the enormous crowds needed.
Is there a problem in the nation? Hear ordinary Americans chant: “O-ba-ma!” One tedious, serpentine line outside the Mall, its restlessness surfacing, suddenly was prodded into happiness when teenagers broke into song: “We’re off to see Obama — the wonderful president of ours!”
The crowd — dense and chilled, vital and hopeful — was the place to be for savoring this day’s history. There was no way not to sense, inevitably to join in, the joy that seemed to roll as a singular force across the Mall and out to the watching nation.
In saluting “our patchwork heritage,” President Obama could have been describing his audience that stretched back toward the Lincoln Memorial — a splendid array of skin color, assembled pride and historic sharing that put a fresh gleam on that well-worn notion of American politics, integration.
Beyond celebrating Lincoln and emancipation, the throngs included tribes of American Indians celebrating — oh yes, “O-ba-ma!” — like victorious conventioneers in their burnished regalia at a hotel party Monday night. Downtown, bars were booming under a sliver of moon on a cold night. The Metro trains were busy with travelers in gowns and tuxes. One young African-American father rode almost dreamily, his thoughts somewhere else as he repeatedly kissed the forehead of his child.
The next day, under the inaugural sunshine, just as the president took the oath, a bearded black man in a fur coat shouted with a near gasp: “You the man!” Some in the crowd had to caper — two women doing the cancan and waving a sign: “Yes we Can-Can!” But others quietly showed tears. Anyone in the crowd had to hope the new president, for all his careful warning about hard times, got a sense of how the public rooted for him on Day 1.
The inaugural crowd of Ronald Reagan had its own joy and made a great scene 28 years ago. But that felt much more about one party’s victory, particularly when he denounced government itself as the problem, not the solution.
That remains a shocking notion in a democracy, and Mr. Obama took aim at it. He summoned the throng before him, and the nation all about, to abandon the “stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long.” Show that government does indeed work, was his prescription, yoking the fortunes of both public and president. “We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off,” said President Obama, touching the crowd’s craving for something basic, something lately untried.
The Obama speech patterns became a separate source of celebration, the way John F. Kennedy imitators used to do “vi-gah” salutes. After the speech, a man happily walking a bridge back to Virginia as the best way home suddenly tried an Obama riff on his friends. “We must walk the bridge built by our ancestors! We will find it long and hard! And we will confront Exit 10 C — wherever it leads!” His friends laughed and shared the pleasure of having heard firsthand President Obama in his opening hour.
Farther ahead on the bridge, a man who came up from Georgia to hear Mr. Obama said he’ll be grateful forever to have been in that crowd on the Mall. He said his new president didn’t pull punches in convincing him that “this winter of our hardship” will be seasons long. “But it’s gonna be alright,” the Georgian firmly insisted as the inaugural crowd dispersed out toward home and the future.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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