Ceremony is more celebration than solemnity

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - For a nation sunk in financial crisis and shaken by recession, the inauguration of the 44^th president seemed to have as much boisterous bonhomie as a Big 10 football game on a blustery afternoon.

Senators and Supreme Court justices were gawking and pointing at celebrities on the risers above.

President George W. Bush — booed lustily by the crowd in front of the platform — sat firing jokes at Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice John Paul Stevens.

After walking onto the inaugural platform, Bush gave a quick kiss to Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., and had a momentary encounter with the man whom he beat in 2000, Al Gore. Bush got a much warmer greeting – a modified shoulder squeeze — from former President Bill Clinton.

From a vantage point on the viewing platform a couple of hundred feet away, Justice Clarence Thomas could be seen chatting and laughing with House Democratic Whip James Clyburn. It was a conversation between two very different African-American men of the South, Thomas of Georgia and Clyburn of South Carolina, who came of age in the early 1960s.

Bipartisan cooperation became physical when Sen. Carl Levin received a boost onto a chair from Sen. John McCain – so Levin could snap a picture. It was his version of a class photo.

Would-be presidents abound
It was also a morning full of poignant reminders of what might have been: One of the earliest arrivals on the platform was Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who in Iowa in 2004 seemed likely to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Would-be presidents were all over the platform: the man Obama defeated, McCain; the man George W. Bush defeated, Al Gore; and the man Ronald Reagan defeated in 1984, Walter Mondale.

The party atmosphere amid the throng that stretched out from the Capitol and down the Mall was to be expected. But what was most surprising was the lack of solemnity —the giddy, contagious happiness — of normally staid Democratic members of Congress seated on the platform behind the rostrum.

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It seemed at times as if we were back in Iowa, or South Carolina, on the campaign trail one year ago. The crowd’s chant of “O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma” began in anticipation of his entrance.

Leading a nation confronted by financial distress, Obama often has been compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the films of FDR’s solemn inaugural in 1933 show none of the effervescence of Tuesday’s ceremony. Nor was Roosevelt the object of crowds chanting, “FDR, FDR!”

Address veers from FDR's path
And unlike Roosevelt, Obama did not use his address to lay out a lengthy indictment of the financiers whose errors helped create the financial crisis.

He settled instead for just a passing blow: “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” The crowd responded with a huge cheer.

Roosevelt, taking office in 1933, was far blunter: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. … The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”

As he did during the campaign, Obama claimed that he had inaugurated a new kind of nonpartisan, non-trivial politics.

“We come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics,” he declared.

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