Charles Laffiteau's Bigger Picture
What a difference four years can make! On 20 January 2009 I stood near the Capitol steps in bitterly cold weather and witnessed the inauguration of America’s first African-American president. But when I looked back towards the Lincoln Memorial and saw that a crowd of almost two million people were also braving the freeze to be witnesses to history, the chill seemed to leave my bones.
Flash-forward four years and a day to 21 January 2013, and history was once again being made in Washington DC. The temperature was milder, and even though the throng was estimated to be only half as large as that four years ago, this was still the third largest presidential inauguration crowd, and the largest multitude to ever attend any American president’s second inauguration.
However, the biggest difference was in the tone and tenor of President Obama’s inaugural address to the American people. When he first took office in 2009, his inaugural speech reflected his belief that he could guide the opposing Republican and Democratic sides in Congress to rise above partisanship and work together to address long standing issues such as universal healthcare, illegal immigration and climate change. But after spending most of his first term trying in vain to negotiate with an intransigent Republican Congress, President Obama is no longer under the illusion that he will be able to reach a consensus with Republicans in Congress.
While he acknowledged his willingness to continue to try and negotiate with Republicans on gun control, immigration and deficit reduction legislation in his 2013 inauguration speech, President Obama also issued a stern rebuke to his most virulent Republican opponents, pointedly stating that “we cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate”.
Past leaders will be the first to tell you that there is no other job in the world that can ever really prepare someone for the job of being President of the United States of America. So like his predecessors, President Obama also had to spend a good bit of his first term simply learning how best to do the job. His second term therefore provides an opportunity for President Obama to demonstrate what he learned from the mistakes he made during his first four years, and to achieve those goals he wasn’t able to realise in his first term.
To that end, the President Obama of 2013 appears to have adopted a different type of leadership style centred on the idea that others must follow his lead, instead of his first term philosophy of everyone working together. I believe the more determined and forceful tone of his 2013 inauguration speech is in part a reflection of the lessons he learned during his first four years in office. But it is also recognition of the fact that he is the first president in more than half a century to have won two consecutive elections with well over 50 per cent of the national vote in each one.
Congressional Republicans quite predictably responded negatively to the more forceful and determined tenor of the president’s inaugural address, since he was also using it to effectively remind them that he won the election, and it was time for them to deal with it. But Republicans also don’t want to acknowledge that they effectively put themselves in their current weak negotiating position by opposing everything President Obama proposed for the last four years. The fact that he was re-elected by a wide margin even though the nation’s economy was still in the doldrums is a testament to the failure of Republicans’ ‘obstruct Obama at every turn’ tactics.
That President Obama sounded more determined to address issues like gun control and immigration wasn’t a surprise to most observers here in America. The fact that he has decided to issue executive orders to address these issues if Congress won’t pass his legislation was no shock, either. But the fact that he used his 2013 inauguration speech to put climate change at the top of his second-term agenda was a huge surprise for me. More on that next time.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Political Economy. He previously lectured on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU from 2009-2011.
