Godspeed President Obama

PRESIDENT Obama issued a strong call to service in his inaugural speech today. Recognizing the crisis he spoke firmly about the need for all Americans to participate in the effort of recovery. First he spoke about the problems:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

He remembered the previous generations, who toiled that we might enjoy our present prosperity. He celebrated our mongrel heritage.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.

Then he urged America to come together to solve the problems.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies...

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true... What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

All this is true, and glorious. And in these words we can see in President Obama’s words the opportunity for greatness.

As a conservative, what comes through to me clearly today is that the whole liberal project has come down to this great moment, the day when an African American became president. All over the United States our liberal friends are fulfilled. Today the risks and the courage of the early civil rights movement, when it was dangerous to advocate for civil rights, are redeemed.

For that we say to our liberal friends: well done thou good and faithful servant.

But we reminid our liberal friends of the costs they have burdened on our nation as they pursued this vision. These include the devastation of the low-income family, the gigantic size and weight of government, the truculence of liberals in their government sinecures, and the flight from responsibliity to “rights.”

When President Obama invokes the old things: “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” conservatives shake their heads. Where have you been all this while, Mr President? And what chance do you have in turning your political base, which advocates for people who don’t work much, which doesn’t believe in manly courage, which calls its adversaries haters and worse, and which sneers at patriotism when it’s not accusing people of questioning its patriotism?

When I look at America, I see liberals in the schoolhouse door, liberals making health care cumbersome and expensive, liberals mucking up the housing market, liberals devastating families, liberals discouraging thrift and good husbandry. In January 2009, more than ever, the word must go forth: physician, heal thyself.

If President Obama can turn liberals from hate and the worship of political power to love and the old things, then he will truly take his place as a great President of the United States.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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Liberal Coercion

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Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

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