The Obama Inauguration in Promises Streamed and in Found Forgiveness

Michael Krebs January 21, 2009

The Obama inauguration demonstrated one of the key promises of his presidency – it was hip and it was brought forward to audiences through a general embrace of technology. He was streamed – at times stutteringly and in a manner that underscores an Obama projection that a new broadband infrastructure is coming.

We watched from our cubes and from our conference rooms and from our dorms with a congruent rapture and a collective humming revelry of what will be and what can be.

I caught the event in an open space Manhattan office, listening to the myriad streams echoing in the chorus of their unique signatures – one machine to and from another – feeling too the collective goose bumps and becoming reacquainted with the sensation, having lost it eight years prior with the loss of William Clinton’s oratory mastery and his certain truths.

Obama was cool and poetic and pragmatic – and the hope that propelled him to his earned position on this well-earned day emanated and warmed the many bundled onlookers and celebrants who cheered him on.

DC was transcendent, closing on this embrace and welcoming every word – no worry of what is next, only happiness in what is now.

I found myself later in an elevator breaking the usual and strange anonymity, feeling maybe that all things could be broken and then replaced.

“What a day, huh?”

“It is a special day,” said the recipient of my query, a 40-something middle manager riding along in this descending box and holding papers.

“Where do we go from here?” I wanted to know, and I wanted to be clear that I was not referencing the arctic air outside.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll take one day at a time.”

And so a day-by-day forgiveness has come about – one that did not exist under Bush. And this forgiveness is both dangerous and exhilarating – it is both foolhardiness and profound freedom. The Dow Jones Industrial Average today fell below eight thousand and there is forgiveness. Well, maybe just today.

And here we are together in a new day – blank slates and fresh eyes open, nihilists unattached to the former rules and looking again for new definitions forty four presidents deep.