Bahamas Blog

Who didn't watch (or attend) the inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday? No one I know.

Unfortunately, it wasn't much of a speech the new president gave.

Obama got where he is by his dynamic speeches. But he would never have been elected if he had given this kind of lackluster speech during the campaign. It was his worst speech, and on his biggest stage thus far.

I think Alex Spillius, a blogger for the UK Telegraph hit the nail on the head in his assessment:

Quote:

The delivery, as ever, was first class, but the message was wasn't clear enough and the language not insufficiently inspiring. As soon as the applause had died down, an African American standing man near me on the Mall said to his friend: "I thought the speech was shit." Another woman said, correctly, that "we had heard it all before at other events". In a way Obama was a victim of his own success. Having given so many dynamic speeches he had set his own bar very high. What he tried to do at his inauguration was tell Americans that they had to sacrifice to make gains, while making them believe this was well within their capabilities. The emphasis on sacrifice was too weak however. To the disappointment of many black people in the crowd, he also made but one reference to the enormity of a black man occupying the White House for the first time. Obama has never laboured the issue of his race, but on this historic day the issue needed more. Jon Favreau, his co-writer, recently admitted that he had been pouring over previous inaugural speeches. That might have been a bad idea. Obama seemed weighed down by the past, and failed to seize the moment.

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