Obama’s audacious second-term agenda

What happened

President Obama launched his second term as president this week with a full-throated defense of progressive government, insisting in his inaugural address that “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Obama took the oath of office before a crowd of about 700,000 people on the National Mall on Monday,before delivering a fiery speech in which he called for immigration reform, action to slow climate change, and full recognition of the equality of gays and lesbians. In a rebuke to Republicans, Obama said the country could not afford to get bogged down in “centuries-old debates about the role of government,” but needed to act promptly to address its problems and expand opportunity. Obama insisted that deficit reduction did not justify deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, saying these safety-net programs “do not make us a nation of takers. They free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

Republicans said they were affronted by the aggressive tone of the speech, which they called unduly partisan. “The era of liberalism is back,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “If the president pursues that kind of agenda, obviously, it’s not designed to bring us together.”

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What the editorials said

This speech was the coming-out party for the real Obama, said the San Jose Mercury News. The president finally affirmed his belief in activist government as a force for good, “rooted firmly in America’s founding philosophies.” He “promised to continue the never-finished task of ensuring that all of us—including the poor, immigrants, gays and lesbians, women—have the opportunity to realize our dreams.” With this audacious and eloquent speech, said The New York Times, Obama proved he “has the ambition and intellect to place himself in the first rank of presidents.”

Great presidents bring Americans together, not divide them, said The Wall Street Journal. Obama’s “takers” reference was a cheap shot against Republicans, and his nakedly liberal rhetoric made it clear that he’ll continue “to demean and stigmatize those who disagree with him.” Words alone do not make for presidential greatness, said NationalReview.com. After four years of ever-expanding government, swelling deficits, and wealth redistribution, “the rhetoric is still soaring, and the country is still stagnating.” That’s the real Obama.

What the columnists said

Obama’s goal is now clear, said Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post. He hopes to use the next four years “to achieve presidential greatness,” becoming a transformative president on the scale of Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. “In this, he will almost certainly fail.” As the first African-American president, Obama is guaranteed a place in history, but his main legislative achievement—Obamacare—may yet backfire, and he’s shown no leadership on the great crisis of our age, the exploding deficit. Even so, Obama sees himself as Lincoln’s heir, said Mona Charen in NationalReview.com.He chose to take his oath on Honest Abe’s Bible and poached phrases and ideas from Lincoln’s speeches. But whereas Abe was humble and inspirational, offering “charity to all’’ even during the Civil War, Obama preens and struts like a triumphant conqueror. “He doesn’t even understand Lincoln’s greatness, far less partake of it.”

He may not be Lincoln, said Ezra Klein in Bloomberg.com, but Obama has achieved more in his first term than “most presidents secure in two”—despite relentless Republican obstructionism. His universal health-care law is “the most significant piece of social policy passed since the Great Society,” and his bailouts of Wall Street and Detroit staved off a second Great Depression. He ended the war in Iraq, is pulling us out of Afghanistan, and has already reduced the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade. If Republicans act responsibly, Obama may achieve even more in term two.

In his second term, said David Maraniss in The Washington Post, Obama will be a changed man. The past four years have toughened him, and the Newtown, Conn., school shootings affected him profoundly, leaving him with “a deep sense of remorse” that he had ignored gun control out of political expediency. Since then, “he has shown more passion and resolve.” That passion will “not ensure success, let alone greatness,” but in his next four years, the once-enigmatic Obama will pursue his idealistic goals forcefully, “and show people who he really is.”