Practice makes perfect, even for presidential inaugurations. Sunday in Washington, a collection of military officials and civilian planners practiced the swearing-in ceremony and parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, complete with stand-ins for the president-elect, veep-elect, and their families. So complete was the run-through, reports the Washington Post, that the Obama understudy even delivered a six-word-long Inaugural Address: “My Fellow Americans. God Bless America.”
These two phrases have become such an ingrained part of presidential rhetoric that you can be pretty sure they’ll appear in any big speech. And the rest, let’s be honest, is just filler. Hope, dreams, optimism, peaceful transition, turning the page, new chapter, best days ahead, bright futures, real challenges, working together, overcoming, honoring, thanking, remembering, renewing, proposing, prosperity, peace, freedom, vigilance, security, happiness, children, children, children, veterans, teachers, middle-class, hard-working Americans, single moms, ordinary people, extraordinary times, Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, education, health care, Social Security…. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
The always-entertaining Mark Leibovich of the New York Times wrote this weekend about the most cherished tradition of inaugural addresses: invoking the need for bipartisanship, for changing the tone, for being BFF, for cooperating in the best interest of the American people – because that is, after all, what they elected us to do.
As Leibovich points out, presidents have been seeking to change the tone and cajoling both sides to put aside bitterness from time immemorial. And for almost as long, people have been invoking the names Adams and Jefferson to explain that electoral bitterness may be hard-wired into Americans. The past only seems more pleasant because time, as they say, tempers all emotions. The Abraham Lincoln everybody loves wouldn’t be recognizable to many of the people living in the divided country he led. Which is why George W. Bush is hoping (or, at least, the people who like him are hoping) that a hundred years from now, the vicious op-ed columnists and MSNBC hosts who are in vogue today will be as forgotten as Millard Fillmore.
This time around everyone seems to be trying harder to get along during the transition, whether because of the current financial turmoil or because we all recognize that there’s a little extra historical oomph to this inauguration (and why insist on standing athwart history when you can save your energy and let history do the pulling). Which means that when the new President Obama asks God to bless his fellow Americans next Tuesday, we might all, just for a second, really believe we’re in the same boat.
