This was the most sustainedly "progressive" statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage. 
 
 I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations -- mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now -- well, it's almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to use the power of the presidency on the causes he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term ... no, he apparently does not. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Of course Obama established the second half of the speech, about voting rights and climate change and "not a nation of takers" and "Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall" [!] etc, with careful allusions through the first half of the speech to to our founding faiths -- and why doing things "together," the dominant word of the speech, has always been the American way. 
 
 
 
 More detailed parsing later, but this speech made news and alters politics in a way I had not anticipated. 
 
 ||||| A compilation of analysis and reaction to President Obama’s inaugural speech. Transcript of the speech here. By the way, this speech ran to 2,114 words. He used 2404 in 2009. Matthew Continetti: “It is of course possible that the inauguration of a reelected president is his moment of maximum triumph. It is of course possible that Obama’s second term may turn out like George W. Bush’s, when the lyricism and passion of the second inaugural collided with the realities of strategic miscalculations and unexpected events. I have my doubts. What I do not doubt is that the generation of conservatives and Republicans who return one day to power will be forced to reckon with the consequences of the Obama revolution, just as a generation James Fallows believes this was the most sustainedly “progressive” statement Barack Obama has made in his decade in the national eye. I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations — mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now — well, it’s almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to say what he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term … no, he apparently does not. First Read expected familiar themes: Looking back at some of the most recent second inaugural addresses, they’ve typically been a continuation of that president’s first-term message (and re-election theme). For Bill Clinton, it was preparing the country for the 21st Century. For George W. Bush, it was security and freedom. And if that continuation theme is any guide, expect Obama to talk A LOT about rebuilding the middle class. After all, it was the central theme of his re-election campaign. David Frum declares that, ”however beautifully written, a speech can only be made great by the presidency that follows”: A speech can fail all by itself. Its ideas can be weak, its language can be foggy. But even if the ideas are clear and the words crisp, an inaugural address can be deemed “great” only if it is followed by actions that make good on its lofty words. This is why we still remember the mighty words of Lincoln and FDR and why we forget almost all the others. Ed Kilgore interprets it “as an unambiguous, even combative, progressive reclamation of patriotic traditions and vocabulary”: That was made obvious when he began with the Declaration of Independence, the document that the Tea Party Movement has sought to make an eternal charter for absolute property rights, rigidly limited government, Christian Nationalism, and freedom from mutual responsibility. Obama boldly and repeatedly identified equal opportunity as the basic point of the Declaration, and the basic content of “American exceptionalism.” Just as boldly, he made the quality of our “collective action,” not its absence, the measure of our fidelity to national traditions, specifically touting climate change, equal opportunity for women and GLBT folk, a fair immigration system, and succor for people struggling to survive as immediate challenges that no manner of “different opinions” can wish away. John Pitney said the President indulged his penchant for straw men: Who has ever claimed that a single person could build highways or train thousands of teachers? The question is not whether people will work together, but whether that cooperation will take place though the marketplace, the voluntary sector, or the government. David Shipley wanted a workmanlike speech: I’ve come to believe that the most memorable inaugural address would be one that doesn’t sound like an inaugural address. … How much better to craft something granular, programmatic. Almost a State of the Union — but short. It certainly suits the moment — one when Americans are avidly hoping for detailed structural reform on specific issues. Bill Clinton famously declared that the era of big government was over. Can’t the era of big rhetoric be over, too? Tomasky hoped for a “tough” speech: He needs to send a signal in his address that he means business and that he’s figured out who’s boss. … That doesn’t mean an explicitly partisan speech about specific policies. That would be, in addition to inappropriate, crushingly dull. It does mean a speech in which he puts forward an idea about the country that is pointed and that can’t be expressed in the usual inoffensive platitudes. Peter Beinart thinks Obama needed to defend the role of government: Obama will not win every skirmish with the Republican Congress in his second term. But to achieve his goal of being a transformational president, he must decisively win the overarching struggle over whether post-financial crisis America requires more government or less. His second inaugural will be judged on how well he defines the terms of that debate. Matt Yglesias viewed the speech as “surprisingly timeless and detached from the particular circumstances of the winter of 2012-2013″: Instead he offered a straightforward and fairly abstract case for economic liberalism in the American sense—a not-even-slightly anti-capitalism ideology that nonetheless believes in the importance of a robust welfare state and select government interventions in the economy to overcome collective action problems. Summing up the ideological brief, Obama even indulged in American liberalism’s favorite ideological tic—the insistence that it’s not an ideology at all, but simply a pragmatic response to changing circumstances. ||||| Today in his second inaugural address, President Obama became the progressive leader that many liberals thought they were getting when they voted him into office four years ago. 
 
 
 
 Couched in rhetoric about the need to come together as a country was a strong -- and surprisingly pointed -- invocation of a laundry list of progressive principles: gay rights, voting rights, climate change and the inherent value of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. 
 
 In addition to endorsing that progressive policy agenda, Obama also not-so-subtly criticized what he clearly believes is the hijacking of the Republican party by rank ideologues. "We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate," said Obama. 
 
 This was a speech that could only be given by someone who knew that he would never have to run for re-election again. (Compare Obama's rhetoric today with the inaugural speech he gave in 2009; they are very different addresses.) This was Obama unbound. Distill Obama's speech to a single sentence and that sentence is: "I'm the president, deal with it." 
 
 Obama's rhetoric matches what seems to be a marked change in his approach to legislation -- and Congressional Republicans -- since he won re-election last fall. On both the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling showdowns, Obama outlined his position and stuck to it, forcing Republicans to either move in his direction or run the risk of engaging in a public political fight with him. Both times, Republicans blinked. 
 
 The question going forward is whether President Obama will make good on the progressive agenda he outlined today. Does he push hard on climate change or some sort of broader energy policy? Does he cut a deal with Republicans on immigration reform or go it alone believing they will follow? On guns, will he accept a smaller-bore version of the legislative proposals he outlined last week or go for the whole enchilada (or something close to it)? 
 
 Those questions are, at the moment, impossible to answer. What we do know: In his second inaugural speech, President Obama forcefully embraced the sort of progressive agenda for which liberals -- and Democrats more broadly -- have long pined. ||||| President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address was the most liberal speech he has delivered as president — a blunt summons to wage war on poverty, defend entitlements for the middle class, end “perpetual war” overseas and move past the calibrated progressive agenda of his first term. 
 
 Gone were the pleas for bipartisanship of his first inaugural, vaporized by years of partisan battle and Obama’s own sense of a new mandate — achieving bipartisan results through force, not conciliation. 
 
 Text Size - 
 
 + 
 
 reset First 'gay' mention in an inaugural address POLITICO LIVE Obama speech analysis 
 
 (See also: Complete coverage of the Inauguration 2013) 
 
 Absent, too, were calls for a “balanced approach” to the deficit, the grist of his 2012 campaign speeches, replaced by a naked appeal for the country to forcefully address economic inequality for the sake of its future strength, a theme that strongly echoed John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address. 
 
 “We must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice — not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of [our] principles,” Obama said, addressing, as Kennedy did, his foes both domestic and foreign. 
 
 Obama wanted Monday’s speech, which was mostly finished by the weekend, to bookend with the landmark 2004 address he gave at the Democratic National Convention, his aides said. 
 
 (See also: Obama inaugural address (full text, video)) 
 
 But if that speech, which established Obama as a national player, was plaintive (“People don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life.”), this one was overtly confrontational. 
 
 In a challenge to the GOP, Obama mentioned the country’s $16.4 trillion debt load once and then, only to announce his stalwart opposition to slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. 
 
 “We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit,” said Obama, who viewed Monday’s address as an introductory passage to the more policy-specific State of the Union in a few weeks. 
 
 “But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm.” 
 
 (PHOTOS: Inauguration weekend 2013) 
 
 He discussed his support for gay rights in detail — which he dodged in previous speeches — but omitted his recent call for sweeping gun-control measures, leaving that, presumably, for his State of the Union address in February. 
 
 In the short term, the powerful speech — delivered with an unreserved verve not seen much since the 2008 campaign — signals a tough battle ahead on deficit reduction, budget-cutting and entitlement reform for Republicans. ||||| 12 pm. Well either Kelly Clarkson was way off or her mike was. But the speech instantly removed any awkwardness that lingered. If you have long believed, as I have, that this man could easily become the liberal Reagan by the end of his second term (even Ross now agrees), then this speech will not have surprised you. The president went out of his way to acknowledge the tradition of free enterprise, risk, individualism and all that fuels and furnishes the broad swathe of what might even now still be called American conservatism. This is not new; in fact, whenever you hear Obama extoll those virtues, you know what's coming next. 
 
 Which is to say: All of that is simply not enough "in new times." In an era of globalization, of soaring social and economic inequality, of growing debt, of crumbling infrastructure, and of technological revolution: we have to act collectively as well. We cannot balance the budget entirely by ourselves as individuals; or rebuild the country's human capital without government investment in education; or provide the firmest foundation for capitalism to thrive if the system is rigged - and seen by most to be rigged - for the powerful and their interests alone. We have to make the tax code simpler to save our democracy from the lobbying locusts feeding relentlessly off it. We have to invest in physical and human capital more effectively if we are to meet the challenges of our age. 
 
 What he was saying, in other words, is that he is not interested in answering for all time the fundamental question of the role of government - because that question is simply not answerable for all time. We will never answer it definitively. Because it is one of humankind's greatest and deepest questions. At the same time, we live in a specific time with specific issues and new questions - and the difference between an ideologue and a statesman is that a statesman's job is not to bang on for ever about "freedom" or "equality" in the abstract (we can leave that to Fox and MSNBC), but to make the right prudential judgments in the moment, with limited knowledge, as best he can, in the interests of all of us. 
 
 It was, in some ways, then a final rejoinder to Ronald Reagan's critical qualifier to his declaration of government as the problem in January 1981: "In this present crisis ..." This Inaugural Speech was not so much a repudiation of that (as we know, there are aspects to the Gipper's transformation of American politics Obama has long publicly honored). It was to say that Reagan's solutions may have been right then but they are not right now. 
 
 But I don't want to imply this was not a self-confident center-left speech. Indeed, it was the first one in my adult lifetime that also seemed to carry a national mood with it. Instead of fearing a "world without boundaries," Obama argued that Americans should relish it: "We are made for this moment." But the challenges are so large that only collective solutions and government action can truly make a difference. The goal? The restoration of the "broad shoulders of the middle class" - a culturally conservative goal in these tectonic times. 
 
 And then the first big disappointment and the first big surprise. The first big disappointment is his not being honest with us about the entitlement state. We will have to choose between caring for our elderly and investing in our children if we do not reform entitlements and raise taxes and cut defense. Merely talking about innovations in lowering healthcare costs is truly not enough. The first big hope - huge savings from electronic records - has turned out so far to be a dud. When we face that challenge, telling us we do not have to choose is not leadership. It's pious bullshit. Trade-offs are necessary. 
 
 Then the big surprise: climate change. I didn't think he'd put such a strong emphasis on it so emphatically, when the carbon energy industry is thriving, and when the economy remains depressed. But I think he realizes, as we all do, that future generations may look back on us entirely through this prism of our collective failure to conserve the very planet we live on through a mass rush for global wealth whose consequences are unknowable and yet whose power continues to pummel the earth we once knew. I have no idea what this would mean - in my dreams, a carbon tax in tax reform? - but it was heartening to see Obama return to it. 
 
 On foreign affairs, we are in a different universe than four years ago in terms of context. He has ended one horrifyingly brutal and misguided war; he will end a second one that became almost a definition of mission creep. He has ended torture as an instrument of public policy, even as his drone war has decimated al Qaeda with (again) unknowable blowback and with definite sacrifices in terms of our civil liberties. But he also refused to engage in talk of "perpetual war" - a nice inversion of Kant and an accurate description of the neocon worldview that he has a chance to marginalize even further in the next few years. 
 
 I have often remarked when challenged on my continued support and admiration for this president the following: "He's a moderate Republican. Why wouldn't I like him?" But this is, of course, too glib. I think his obvious conviction that the powerless and poor need more government support, not less, moves him clearly into the liberal, progressive camp. But beneath all of it is a Toryism of sentiment, a Burkean and Niebuhrian understanding of liberal progress, a president with a grasp that tragedy and paradox stalk the human experience: 
 
 We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall. 
 
 Anthony Quinton once called conservatism the "politics of imperfection." I believe Obama to be, at his core, a fusion of that great conservative insight into human affairs with that great liberal passion for a better future for more and more human beings: something perfectible, but never perfect. 
 
 Over the years, I've never let go of that understanding of conservatism's core truth - that all politics ends in some version of failure, that we cannot change and should not want to change the whole world over night, that constant failure is integral to human life and action - and the key spur to fleeting success. But I've also come to accept and more firmly believe that the flip-side to that must never be cynicism or retreat or nihilism. It must be to play our part where we can to fight injustice, knowing that our achievement will be partial, knowing that as soon as we have solved problems, new ones will replace them, and knowing that the process never ends. In fact, the true hero is the one who acts even in the knowledge of inevitable failure, who puts the realizable good before the unrealizable perfect. Yes, over the last six years, Obama has helped me understand his method of community organization, of leading from behind. And it is as conservative in its understanding of how society really changes from below as it is liberal in its refusal to relent against injustice. 
 
 One reason I have shifted has been my experience of the gay revolution in America and the world. I never believed that out of such tragedy could come such progress. That movement of conscience and persistence came from below. The last people to lead it - of course! - were the politicians. It rose in part from the ashes of anger and despair. But it led to an openly gay immigrant giving the inaugural poem (more on that soon) and to these historically unprecedented passages in this speech: 
 
 We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall ... Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. 
 
 Obama included these references rightly in the context of other struggles. This is not about identity politics but human and civic equality that goes far beyond the gay experience. But sometimes you have to remember how far we have come, with this man pushed relentlessly forward by our pressure and by our conversations with each other. On the weekend we celebrate the memory of the assassinated Dr King, we also re-elect the country's black president, who also happens to be finally embracing the civil rights cause of his time and ours'. 
 
 So forgive me genuflecting a little before this moment - but I didn't think I'd ever live to see it. I didn't just see it, but heard and felt it - and saw in this morning and early afternoon a tableau of democratic diversity that was indeed, to my mind, a city on a hill, deeply shifting, in its symbolism and multicultural dynamism, the "opinion of mankind" and our global future. 
 
 This has been a grueling few years of economic and military and psychological recovery for a nation still reeling from the new era that began on the 11th of September 2001 and plunged into more crisis in 2003 and 2008. But healing is possible and is happening. The crazies still dominate the airwaves, but the sane center showed up on election day. And the new patchwork that is always America is as vibrant as it has ever been - more different than ever before, including more lives and faiths and loves and genders. So I say this with a mixture of embarrassment (because it is a bit corny) but pride (because it is our duty as Americans and my first Inaugural knowing that I may soon become one): 
 
 Know Hope. 
 
 (Photos: People listen as U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during his public swearing in ceremony as they stand on the National Mall during the Inauguration ceremony on January 21, 2013 in Washington, DC. The President was sworn in for second term. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern on March 26, 1964, via Wiki.) 
 
 11.58 am. I'm going to let him give the entire address before jumping in. Here it is: 
 
 11.53 am. Well, they got it right this time: crisp, authoritative, clear. Sometimes I wonder if this entire period will be seen in part as a struggle between these two men - Roberts and Obama. He's a shrewder, calmer, and more authentically conservative check on the president than the current deranged House of Representatives. 
 
 11.50 am. So we have a presiding Justice who grew up in her grandmother's South Bronx apartment, practising insulin shots for her own diabetes on oranges, reciting the oath of office for vice-president, a good ol' Irish-Catholic from Delaware. The best things about America are the things you don't really need to say.
– A Band-Aid to heal a divided America, it was not: Liberals and conservatives alike are calling President Obama's fiery inaugural speech today a call to arms for liberal values in stark opposition to his opponents. A sample: "I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on," writes James Fallows at The Atlantic. To the contrary, "it's almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to say what he cares about." "Obama’s rhetoric matches what seems to be a marked change in his approach to legislation—and Congressional Republicans—since he won re-election last fall," writes Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. "On both the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling showdowns, Obama outlined his position and stuck to it. ... Both times, Republicans blinked." Calling it "the most liberal speech he has delivered as president," Glenn Thrush at Politico writes: "In a challenge to the GOP, Obama mentioned the country’s $16.4 trillion debt load once and then, only to announce his stalwart opposition to slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security." On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer called it "Obama unbound" and "the end of Reaganism," adding, "This speech was a declaration the era of big government is back." But Andrew Sullivan somehow found a middle ground: "If you have long believed, as I have, that this man could easily become the liberal Reagan by the end of his second term ... then this speech will not have surprised you," he writes at the Daily Beast. Obama acknowledged "free enterprise, risk, [and] individualism," but emphasized that "we have to act collectively as well." Read the entire speech here.