Obama sworn in as 44th president

Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States
Tuesday at noon, taking the oath of office with hand on a Bible once owned by President
Abraham Lincoln.

A
huge, record-breaking crowd stretched
west of the Capitol along the national Mall, there to witness the historic
event of an African-American, for the first time, taking the highest office in
the nation. 

{mosads}The oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts while
Michelle Obama stood at her husband’s side, marked the climax of two years of
campaigning, more than two months of transition since the election, and several
days of celebrations that have flooded the nation’s capital with visitors. 

Tens of thousands of people arose before dawn Tuesday and stood
for hours in freezing temperatures on the national Mall to watch the spectacle
in person or on large-screen outdoor televisions. Telecom companies, fearing
the deluge would overwhelm their networks, asked the public to limit text
message and cell-phone snapshots during the ceremony.

Members of Congress braved the blustery cold
on risers set up along the Capitol’s west front for nearly an hour. Lawmakers
awaited the arrival of the nation’s new commander-in-chief, who was an Illinois
state senator just a little over four years ago.

Future historians may someday judge Obama’s impact on
race relations and how many African Americans view themselves and their
opportunities in American society as his most remarkable contribution to the
national narrative. For now, however, those long-term considerations have taken
a backseat to the economic crisis and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the
U.S. is engaged in.

Obama enters the Oval Office amid the sky-high
expectations of millions of supporters who voted for him, as well as Democratic
lawmakers who are plotting an ambitious agenda on the Hill.

More than 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs
in the last year and millions are facing foreclosure on their homes and
millions more have seen their retirement savings plunge along with the stock
markets.

At the same time the country has tens of thousands of
soldiers committed overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and finds itself still at
war with deadly and elusive terrorists.

Obama won the November general election by promising
to bring change to Washington and now many expect him to pull the U.S. out of
its morass.

However, the incoming president has sought to temper
those expectations by warning his fellow Americans that the road to national
economic recovery will be long and arduous and reminding them that government
cannot solve all problems.

But while Obama recognizes the difficulty of the
challenges he faces, he also recognizes that the stage has been set for
greatness, just as when Lincoln took office on the eve of Civil War and when
Franklin Roosevelt became president in the midst of the Great Depression.

“You never allow a serious crisis to go to waste,”
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, commented during a recent television
interview. “This is an opportunity to do big things.”

Two of the new president’s biggest ambitions are to
greatly expand healthcare coverage while implementing reforms to minimize costs
and to reduce domestic consumption of fossil fuels by promoting renewable
energy development.

Obama is also seeking to dramatically increase
federal support of education and enact new tax cuts for middle-income
Americans.

As he has since winning the election, Obama on
Tuesday is expected to reach out to Republicans and ask them to work in
partnership to solve the nation’s challenges.

Obama has made clear that fixing the national economy
will be his first priority and that politically divisive legislation, such as
the Employee Free Choice Act, which labor unions have demanded but business
groups oppose, would wait.

Although Obama formally took the reins of power
Tuesday, he has already acted as the nation’s de facto president on the
economy, most obviously in the past two weeks when he worked behind the scenes
with advisers to request congressional approval of the second half of a $700
billion financial stabilization package.

Obama’s next challenge will be to shepherd through
Congress an economic stimulus package that could grow to a trillion dollars
before final passage.

His efforts to build bipartisan support for the
stimulus has already encountered turbulence. Several tax credits he proposed,
including a $3,000 credit for employers, ran into stiff Democratic opposition
while Republicans have panned his proposal to hire hundreds of thousands of
additional federal workers.

But for now Obama is a major political force. More
than 80 percent of Americans have judged his handling of the presidential
transition favorably. And any lawmaker who doubted the methodology of recent
polls only had to look out at hundreds of thousands of eager and anxious
citizens who packed themselves between the Capitol steps and the Washington
Monument Tuesday.