The Administration

As President Obama begins his second term, and his agenda for the next four years begins to unfold, the men and women who make up his cabinet will have the unenviable task of running a massive agency in the face of falling budgets, and increased Congressional scrutiny.
 
Given the president’s performance and inability to work with Republicans, it is not surprising that controversy will befall some of his bigger decisions.  However, the continuing drama over the nomination of Chuck Hagel to replace Secretary Panetta as Defense Secretary represents an unjustifiable opposition based less on fact, and more on personality.
 
Since news of the nomination, lawmakers from both parties were quick to weigh in and air their objections.

Chuck Hagel has long been an outspoken critic of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Since President Obama nominated him to serve as Pentagon chief, hardline defenders of the status-quo have been quick to accuse the former Senator from Nebraska of supporting legislation that would allegedly provide a lifeline to the Castro leadership. One of them, pro-embargo lobbyist Mauricio Claver-Carone, even serves on the board of an outside group named Americans for Strong Defense, whose aim is to thwart Hagel’s nomination through paid TV attack ads.
 
However, as the Senate prepares to question Hagel on his position on Cuba, it should be aware of an incredible irony: Hagel has been accused of being
“soft on Castro” for espousing views that are almost entirely in sync with those of the Island’s leading pro-democracy advocates.

A concerted conservative campaign against Chuck Hagel, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, practically guarantees that his confirmation hearing this week will receive the lion’s share of the media attention regarding Obama’s proposed national security team.

But the back and forth about Hagel’s positions, including his perceived independence from Israel, has obscured a more important question: What signals do Obama’s new foreign policy picks send about the kind of America the rest of the world, and particularly the Middle East, can expect? At present, depending on where you sit, the implications of the Obama nominations could arouse fear (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen,) interest (Iran,) or indifference (the Palestinians.)

The conventionally wise have weighed in and declared — with equal parts delight and dismay — that the president’s second inaugural address was a robust defense of contemporary liberalism that heartened the left and caused the right to issue a resigned “We told you so”: Barack Obama the progressive finally emerged on Inauguration Day.
 
With the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson — once a George W. Bush speechwriter — calling Obama’s speech a “a raging bonfire of straw men” and the Post’s Dana Milbank describing the president as preaching to the choir with “a leftover campaign speech combined with an early draft of the State of the Union address,” you’d think that Obama had served up a point-by-point defense of his discretionary spending prerogatives while challenging Republican House Speaker John Boehner to a winner-take-all hand of head’s-up Texas hold ‘em to settle the federal budget.
 
But they’re both wrong.

The narrative of President Obama’s second inaugural address is clear and directed, when in the first moments of his speech he declared: “We affirm the promise of democracy.”

What does that mean to a man whose chosen adult identity is as a community organizer? It means democracy is a process -- a movement -- to harmoniously reconcile what ought to be, what is, and what can be. President Obama announced the movement by saying, “We continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the reality of our times.”

Second inaugural addresses like second honeymoons typically lack the pizazz of the first go-round. There hasn’t been a memorable second address since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inauguration in 1937. Even the great communicator Ronald Reagan delivered a pedestrian second inaugural address.
Expectations for President Barack Obama’s second inauguration were not as sky-high as they were four years ago. This time, however, President Obama far exceeded expectations. He may not have delivered a speech for the ages. But he gave a powerful address that laid a foundation for his second term in office.

The goal of equal opportunity was a predominant theme of President Obama's second inaugural address at the Capitol yesterday. As in his first inaugural four years ago, the president harkened back to "the ideals of our forbearers," with particular reference to the unalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. The allegiance to such ideals, he said, is what "makes us exceptional."

Noting that the patriots of 1776 "did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few," he asserted that "the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal--is the star guides us still." 

President Obama’s second term has started. History does not hold out much hope of a bold and triumphant second term and most forecasts aren’t very positive, but Obama could defy expectations and historical precedents.

The re-election of an incumbent president is not a given. Including Obama, just 17 out of 44 U.S. presidents have been returned to office and no more than 13 were head of state for all of eight years.

On Inauguration Day 2009, Barak Obama was sworn in as America’s first black president. An estimated 1.8 million people came to Washington to be part of that profound historical event. Even with the economy sinking, the streets of the capital were joyous and exciting.

This Inauguration Day promises to be different, with a substantially smaller crowd of 600,000 to 800,000 expected. In 2009, there were 10 official inaugural balls, compared to two this year. They will both be in the Washington Convention Center: one for the public and guests, the other primarily for military families and veterans. This will be the smallest number of inaugural balls held for any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Read more...

Thousands of Americans will attend President Obama’s inauguration, parade, and the whirlwind of balls and social events that follow. Millions more will hear about the ceremony and festivities through snippets of media play and hours of ensuing commentary.

But all this attention prompts a blunt question: What’s the point of the inauguration?

The query is a little more pointed this year since the president will have already have taken his oath of office. The Constitution specifies that a president’s term begins on January 20th, but since that’s a Sunday (and, for many, a proverbial day of rest), Mr. Obama will recite his oath for a symbolic second time on Monday, when the nation’s capitol has set aside a full day for pageantry and celebration.