Obama's and Lincoln's Inaugural Addresses and Much More
1. Inaugurations, Past and Present
When Barack Obama took this oath at noon on January 20, 2009, he became the forty-fourth president of the United States to repeat these exact thirty-five words. The words haven't changed since our first president, George Washington, spoke them in New York City on April 30, 1789. A great deal about presidential inaugurations has changed over the course of two centuries -- their date, where they are held, the ceremonies surrounding them, and the number of people who are able to see and hear them, just for starters. This oath of office, however, as written into the U.S. Constitution, has not changed at all.
Think of the often-violent changes of power that go on routinely in other countries. In many cases, power-hungry factions ignore the will of the people and seize the reins of government by force. Now think of the forty-four U.S. presidents over the course of 220 years, standing in front of the American people, raising their hands, and taking this oath.
As Dr. Donald R. Kennon, chief historian of the United States Capitol Historical Society, says: "Our American Revolution was an experiment to see if the people could govern themselves. And the regular and routine nature of a presidential inauguration reassures the people that the experiment is continuing and succeeding."
3. Barack Obama
"That Great Gift of Freedom": Setting the Scene
The Washington D.C. morning dawned partly cloudy and cold -- temperatures under 20 degrees -- as hundreds of thousands of people began gathering expectantly in the city. They came from every part of the United States and were mainly ordinary people. There was Rebecca Wilks, a forty-six-year-old woman with cerebral palsy whose friends raised $2,500 to send her to the inauguration: "Just pinch me," she told a reporter. There was Greg Weaver, the Amtrak conductor who had befriended Senator Joe Biden as Biden commuted from Wilmington, Delaware, to his office in Washington every day -- and now Biden had invited Weaver and his wife to the inauguration. There was Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who had miraculously landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River the week before, without loss of life, after the plane was hit by birds. President-elect Obama had invited him, his family, and the entire crew of 1549 to attend.
There were the members of high school and college marching bands from all over the country, including boys from the Bonnie Brae Residential Treatment Center in New Jersey, boys without homes to whom was attached, according to their director, "a long laundry list of negative labels." Yet because oftheir "pride and hope for the future," they had been picked to march in the inaugural parade that would come after Obama's swearing-in.
About a quarter of a million people with tickets -- many of them picked through a lottery system -- gathered near the west front of the Capitol Building. There were also the lucky sixteen hundred who would view the inauguration from seats on the specially erected platform. Hundreds of thousands more thronged the National Mall. People were cold. They had endured security precautions that had never before occurred at any inauguration. More than thirty-five thousand police officers, National Guardsmen, and plainclothes agents from more than fifty agencies were present. The spectators were not allowed to bring in any drinks or food items larger than a small snack. There was no place to sit in the mall and long lines for the portable bathrooms. What had brought all these people together -- and what had caused millions more to gather, in schools, homes, and workplaces, to watch the inaugural events on television and on the internet -- was hope, hope embodied in the person of one man: Barack Obama, who was about to become the first African American president of the United States.
"It Better Be Good!"
As all these people gathered, Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, attended services at St. John's Episcopal Church. St. John's is known as "the Church of the Presidents" because every president-elect since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 has prayed there on the morning of his inauguration. Then he and Michelle went with Vice President - elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, to meet briefly with President George Bush and his wife, Laura, at the White House. After that, Bush and Obama rode together to the swearing-in ceremony, a ride that had become traditional since Martin Van Buren picked up outgoing president Andrew Jackson in 1837.
As he rode to the Capitol Building with Bush, it must have been hard for Barack Obama to keep from thinking about the speech he was going to make, one that so many people around the world were waiting to hear. He had spent days working on it, going through three different drafts to try to get the wording just right. The thought of Abraham Lincoln and his inspiring inaugural speeches was never far from Obama's mind. He knew that comparisons to the best inaugural speeches in our nation's history would be made, yet it was a challenge he was prepared to accept.
One night the previous week, Obama took Michelle and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, to the Lincoln Memorial, thrilling and startling some tourists who were surprised to see the president-elect show up just before closing time. Lincoln's second inaugural address is inscribed on the huge wall of the memorial. The speech is short -- only 704 words long -- and Barack Obama said after his visit: "I'm not sure whether [visiting the Lincoln Memorial] was wise, because every time you read that second inaugural, you start getting intimidated.... There is a genius to Lincoln that is not going to be matched."
Things weren't helped any when his daughter Sasha asked if Obama's own speech was going to be that short, and his daughter Malia interrupted: "First African American president -- it better be good."
5. Two Senators from Illinois
Introducing Barack Obama
There are so many firsts associated with Barack Obama. He's the first president with a name as distinctive as Barack Obama, the first president born in Hawaii, even the first president to have his own My Space page! The most important first is that in 220 years of America's existence, he is our first African American president.
Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama had an unusual and in some ways difficult childhood, but it was one that allowed him to develop empathy for those in pain or trouble. He was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was from the African country of Kenya. His mother, Ann Dunham, was from a small town in Kansas. Both of them were studying at the University of Hawaii when they met. Barack Obama, Sr., was the school's first black student. They fell in love, got married, and had a son, whom they named Barack, which means "blessing"in Swahili, a native African language. Obama's middle name, Hussein, comes from his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama. When Barack was two, his parents divorced. His father eventually returned to Kenya, and his mother remarried. Barack's stepfather was also a student. He was from Indonesia, in Southeast Asia. Young Barack and his mother moved to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, where Barack lived until he was ten. At that time, because his mother was continuing her work in Indonesia and she thought Barack would get a better education in Hawaii, he returned to Honolulu. There he was raised by his grandparents on his mother's side. From fifth through twelfth grade, he attended the Punahou School, a well-known private school.
From Barry to Barack
Barack graduated with honors in 1979, but in some ways his life was a tough one. He admitted to trying drugs and alcohol in high school -- a poor choice that represented "the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy," as he later put it. The absence of his father was difficult for him. When he was twelve, his father returned to Hawaii for a month-long visit. After that visit, Barack would never see his father again. His father died in a car accident in Africa in 1982.
Obama would later write, "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, but having a hard time knowing how to do it." This was especially difficult in Hawaii, where the number of African Americans was small. In fact, while he was in high school, Obama told few people that his real first name was Barack. He introduced himself as Barry.
From Hawaii, Obama went to California, where he studied for two years at Occidental College before transferring to Columbia University in New York. After he graduated, he went to Chicago -- the city that he would eventually call home -- and became a community organizer. He helped poor people to improve their lives by setting up job training programs and by organizing them into groups to fight for their rights. While his friends still called him Barry, he was no longer ashamed of introducing himself as Barack.
After a few years in Chicago, Obama went to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied law and graduated with highest honors. In the summer of 1988, while working part-time in a Chicago law firm, he met his future wife, Michelle Robinson, who had also attended Harvard Law School. She later described him as wearing a "bad sports jacket" and having "a cigarette dangling from his mouth." (Obama has struggled with quitting smoking.) But she found herself liking him because, despite his obvious talent and intelligence, "he didn't take himself too seriously."
The two were married in 1992 and would have two children, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, now 7. In the early 1990s, Barack Obama got involved in politics, working for the Democratic Party in Chicago, and -- like Lincoln before him -- was elected to the Illinois General Assembly. There he continued to work for poor people by helping to pass laws that provided health insurance for those without it. He also sponsored a law that increased funding for the prevention of AIDS.
"Part of the Larger American Story"
In 2004, Barack Obama came to national attention when he gave an important address at the Democratic Convention. Once every four years, when there is a national election for president, the two major parties, the Republicans and Democrats, hold a convention where they officially nominate their candidate. Obama, then known to few Americans outside his home state of Illinois, was running for the United States Senate.
"Let's face it," he began. "My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely." He introduced himself by describing his mixed heritage and out-of-the-ordinary upbringing. "I stand here today grateful for the diversity of my heritage," he continued. "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me." By this he meant that those Americans who worked for freedom and equality in the past had made it possible for Barack Obama, born of a white mother and a black father, to run for the United States Senate, one of the highest offices in the land. We live, he said, "in a generous America." He added to thunderous applause, "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America."
Obama won his race for senator. One of the key roles of the Senate is to establish laws by sponsoring what are called bills. One bill that Obama sponsored established awards that would help college students pay off their loans. He also worked on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. Obama joined with other senators in trying to improve conditions for soldiers returning from the war in Iraq -- a war that Obama opposed.
Then came the longest presidential campaign in American history. In early 2007, more than a year before the election, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, and numerous other politicians all announced that they were running for president. So did Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois. After a hard battle, Obama became the Democratic Party nominee.