The Obama era begins

Barack Obama took his place in presidential history Tuesday when he became the nation’s first African-American president, pledging before record crowds to meet the country’s many serious challenges.

Obama was greeted with a hero’s welcome as he stood before Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to take the oath of office on a Bible once owned by President Lincoln.

{mospagebreak}When Obama finished his pledge to defend the country and Constitution, the roar of the crowd was so strong that reporters sitting on the fourth floor of the Capitol felt tremors.

Security officials estimated that between 1.4 million and 1.8 million people trekked to the National Mall to witness the inauguration of the nation’s first black president 143 years after the abolition of slavery and 54 years after the Supreme Court overturned the legal doctrine underpinning racial segregation laws.

The 44th president declared the nation’s spirit of civic duty as the cornerstone of its greatness and urged his fellow Americans to rise to the spirit of shared sacrifice that paved the way for great strides toward racial equality.

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task,” Obama said during his address.

“This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall. And why a man whose father, less than 60 years ago, might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans from the D.C. area and around the nation traveled to the Mall to catch Obama’s words in person or on large-screen televisions. The audience below the Inaugural podium included black celebrities such as rapper Jay-Z, singer Beyonce Knowles, talk show host Oprah Winfrey, boxer Muhammad Ali, actor Denzel Washington, singer Smokey Robinson, boxing promoter Don King and basketball star Magic Johnson.

A packed crowd extended as far as the eye could see from the West Front of the Capitol, where Obama took his oath, to beyond the Washington Monument, a 1.2-mile expanse. Park police reported that spectators filled the entire two-mile length of the Mall.

The crush of people played havoc with cell phones and portable e-mail devices as a deluge of communication overwhelmed capacity, despite requests by telecom companies earlier in the week that people limit their calls and text messages during the ceremony.

Lawmakers, such as Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), leaned on the balustrade set up along the Inaugural stage to gaze in amazement at the millions who chanted Obama’s name.

There were a few hitches on the cold, crisp day.

Roberts stumbled over the 35-word oath of office, getting the word “faithfully” out of order in the constitutionally prescribed oath. That prompted a second try, wherein all the words were given correctly. It was Roberts’s first time swearing in a chief executive.

And a pall spread over what Democrats had expected to be a day of exultation when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) collapsed at a lunch with the new president a few hours after the inauguration. Kennedy was taken to a D.C. hospital and was said to be in good condition by Tuesday afternoon.

Still, the day belonged to Obama and his family.

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.

Obama enters the Oval Office amid the sky-high expectations of millions of supporters who voted for him.

More than 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last year, and millions are facing foreclosure on their homes. 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 laid out a broad vision of leadership but spent little time discussing policy.

The new president instead reminded Americans of the challenges they face and urged them to brace themselves for an arduous task.

{mospagebreak}“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given,” Obama declared. “It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.

“It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

Invoking the sacrifices of Americans at the battlefields of Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sanh, Obama told Americans that now is the time to get serious.

{mosads}As he had in the days leading up to Inauguration, Obama tried to temper expectations by warning that the nation’s problems could not be solved “easily or in a short span of time.”

And while Obama did not explicitly reach out to Republicans in his speech, he sounded centrist themes that resonated with conservatives.

Obama refused to blame the nation’s economic woes entirely on Wall Street, as some Democrats have done.

Instead, he said that all Americans bear responsibility for failing to “make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — remarks that were interpreted by some Republicans as a call to rein in runaway entitlement spending.

“I agree with him and I commit that I’m willing to meet him more than halfway” on entitlement spending, said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Since winning the election, Obama and his advisers have reached out to Republicans to build a working partnership.

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.

The Dow tumbled 332 points Tuesday, which Bloomberg News said was the worst drop in Inauguration Day history. Most analysts said the drop was due to continuing worries about weakness in the banking sector.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a strongly principled conservative, applauded Obama’s speech for paying homage to self-reliance and hard work.

“He took a center approach,” said Sessions. “He talked about work ethic as the key to what makes America great and he was respectful of conservative core values.”

Obama touched briefly on two of his biggest ambitions: to expand healthcare coverage while implementing reforms to minimize costs and to reduce domestic consumption of fossil fuels by promoting renewable energy development. But he avoided details that would be certain to open partisan and even intra-party rifts.

He made no mention of new tax cuts for the middle class, even though they were a centerpiece of his 2008 campaign.

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 have already encountered turbulence. Several tax credits he proposed, including a $3,000 credit for employers, ran into stiff Democratic opposition.

Meanwhile, 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 had only to look out at hundreds of thousands of eager and anxious citizens who packed themselves between the Capitol steps and the Washington Monument.