Morning E Express! Obama Carries Weight of Economic Trauma, Wars Into Inauguration
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By Julianna Goldman and Michael Tackett
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- American democracy has always promoted a central conceit: Any child can grow up to be president.
For 220 years, the reality has been different, a line of 42 white men.
Today, that string will be broken by a most unlikely individual, a black man born of an African father, with a slight political resume who has described himself as a “skinny guy from the South Side of Chicago with a funny name.”
Barack Hussein Obama, 47, will place his left hand on the Bible of Abraham Lincoln to take the oath of office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, which slaves helped build. The Lincoln Memorial will be within his gaze.
He will immediately inherit an economic mess so grave that it recalls the Great Depression, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the burden of being first. Obama has signaled he will make audacious moves on all fronts.
“He never lets fear of failure prevent him from taking a calculated risk,” says Valerie Jarrett, who will be a senior adviser in the Obama White House and has known him for 18 years.
The new president came to power on the strength of a movement that gathered behind his calls for change and hope. His campaign was underestimated before it became unstoppable.
Today, Obama will try to match the moment with his words. In preparation, he has studied the writings of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
The Real Battle
The 44th president -- Grover Cleveland’s non-consecutive terms made him both the 22nd and 24th chief executive -- rose in part as a result of his opposition to the war in Iraq. He has said that the real battle will be in Afghanistan, where history shows victory could be elusive.
The president-elect has limited national-security experience and his own vice president, Joe Biden, has said he expects that will be tested early in his term.
Even with those stresses to compound the difficulty of a faltering economy, polls suggest the American people have confidence he will succeed.
As many as 2 million people may gather on the National Mall in Washington today to hear his inaugural address. They will include some who arrived on private jets and others who came by bus from long distances.
One of them will be a man who helped to make Obama’s election plausible: Jesse Jackson, who ran the first credible presidential campaigns by an African-American in 1984 and 1988.
The Long Journey
“Given this journey from the hull of ships as slaves to taking the oath of office on the Capitol steps that slaves built and couldn’t walk up, you have the long journey from degradation to a state of grace,” Jackson said in an interview. “Then there is the great journey and the people who made it possible, the marchers and the martyred.”
Juanita Abernathy, wife of the late civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy and an activist herself, says, “We knew one day that it would happen when we all started off in 1955, but all of us thought we would not see it in our lifetime.”
Then there is Sonny Young, 62, who owns a barbershop in Springfield, Ohio. Young’s uncle tried to persuade him to attend King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in August 1963, but Young declined. He drove to the Washington area for Obama’s inauguration because he doesn’t want to miss the moment again.
“Just to be part of that dream that he talked about, part of that dream is being fulfilled with the inauguration,” Young says.
Obama, who played no role in the civil rights movement, has played down race. And some historians say that too much has been made of racial identity.
Identity
“Over the course of the last two years and the professional political campaign success that Obama has had, I don’t think his purely racial identity looms that large for a lot of people,” says David Garrow, author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
“Given the economy, given Iraq, given Afghanistan, given the Middle East, it’s not as if a black presidency is going to transform the lives of any black people,” Garrow says. “It will make people feel good.”
Other scholars see a more exceptional moment. Noting that the Constitution at first didn’t even count blacks as full human beings for census purposes, Lee Baker, a professor of African- American Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says, “It’s affirming the genius of the Framers that this could be a possibility, that somebody who would have counted as three- fifths of a person could be president.”
Enormity
The inaugural ceremony, with Obama’s speech, a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and more than a dozen balls tonight, will soon give way to the enormity of the problems the new president confronts.
The challenges Obama faces on the economy provide him with “one of the greatest tests any president’s had, post-war,” says Mark Gertler, a New York University economics professor who has collaborated on research with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.
It is likely to get worse.
“Nothing that Obama can do can undo the damage quickly,” says Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. “The downturn will be much deeper than it otherwise would have been” because of the missteps of President George W. Bush’s administration, Stiglitz said in an interview. “And it will take much longer to get out of it.”
Stronger Tools
The economic crisis has been likened to the one that faced Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Obama comes in with more tools at his disposal, including an assertive Federal Reserve and stabilizers such as food stamps and unemployment insurance, many of them created under Roosevelt, says Seth Glickenhaus, who was a messenger at Salomon Brothers when the stock market crashed in 1929.
“His job isn’t as great as Roosevelt’s was,” says Glickenhaus, 94, who now manages $1.8 billion as chief investment officer of Glickenhaus & Co. in New York. “Roosevelt was creating these things.”
While the challenge of crafting a solution is apparent, the more subtle task of instilling confidence is just as great.
“People are scared, they’re afraid to lend money, they’re afraid to spend and Obama needs to figure out interventions that are going to change the psychology as much as changing the economics,” says George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology and economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Patience
“Obama is at great risk because the American public is less patient than it was in Roosevelt’s day,” he says. “There’s not going to be a rapid turnaround and if people are too optimistic about what Obama can do, they’re going to end up being disappointed and maybe think that he’s failing when he’s only just begun to turn things around.”
While his success will be measured in the U.S., his every move will be watched in government capitals and financial centers around the world.
“There’s been a sense that we’d erred and that the right prescriptions haven’t been applied to our economy and the right proscriptions haven’t been advanced in our foreign policy,” says Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa who supported Obama during the campaign.
The good will Obama has generated may get him off to a strong start, suggests Douglas Brinkley, a historian and professor at Rice University in Houston.
Says Brinkley: “While the problems are deep, he’s got a lot of wind at his back to really do the kind of big, bold things that people who aspire to the presidency want to do.”
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