I'll give the speech a B+, maybe an A-

I took my lunch hour a little early today (as I suspect many did on my campus) to hear the inaugural address live. Now that I'm home, I'm watching it again, thanks to the miracle of TiVo, and chasing it down with a bottle of Korbel (which has the added benefit of dulling the pain from whatever's going wrong with my teeth right now).

My initial reaction was that I'd hoped for something truly inspiring, and that wasn't what I got. However, as rhetoric goes, it wasn't half bad. Nowhere near as wonky as Clinton, nowhere near as fractured or fictitious as Bush--but also not quite up to the gold standard of a Kennedy or a Franklin Roosevelt or a Lincoln.

I liked that he acknowledged the need for all of us to work on solving the nation's problems. I also liked that he began the address with "my fellow citizens" instead of the more common "my fellow Americans," since, as a commenter at the Great Orange Satan remarked to me earlier today, anybody can be an American, but you have to make a conscious choice to be a citizen.

One thing that distressed me, however, was the speech's focus on the past and the present--but with little time spent on the future, apart from one of the closing sections. For example, early on, President Obama (God, I love writing that!) said:

At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

Good as far as it goes, but--and this is perhaps a Catholic thing, since we conclude many of our prayers with a phrase that runs something like "thus it was in the beginning, so it is now, and thus it shall be forever, world without end." Obama's enumeration stopped at the second iteration, and left out that third--and I would have liked to see him use that device at that point, to emphasize that there will be those who come after us who must do as we do now, and as our ancestors have done before us.

I also liked the fact that he challenged, gently, the failures of the previous administration--and suggested a few of the ways in which he might go about fixing or addressing those failures. I liked especially the repeated invocation of our common bond as citizens of this nation, and also the invocation of our duties that go hand-in-hand with our privileges. Those have been forgotten for too long, in my estimation, and the chief forgetter thereof was, of course the previous president and his administration.

Now, while I can't exactly break into raptures about the qualities of President Obama's rhetoric, I will say that I liked the down-to-earth, no-nonsense, reality-based qualities in his address today. Too many people have given way to an unwarranted enthusiasm, which leads them to believe that Obama can solve every problem, fix every crisis, and that whatever he does is automatically good because it is he that does it. Obama is not the Messiah, he is a man. He is a president, and there are limits on his power--just as there were on the forty-three men who have stood in his place before him.