President-elect Barack Obama arrived Saturday evening in the nation’s capital, a city bursting with anticipation, revelry and elevated hopes for an administration that begins after his inauguration Tuesday as the nation’s 44th president.
The juxtaposition of the jubilant three-day celebration that officially begins Sunday and the hardships the new administration faces — a global financial crisis, two inherited wars and instability in the Middle East — was not lost on the incoming president.
In Philadelphia, before boarding a flag-draped Amtrak train bound on a journey similar to one Abraham Lincoln took to his inauguration in 1861, Obama said that while the nation’s challenges are serious and new, the ideals essential to fixing them are not.
“What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that our founders displayed,” Obama said. “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”
Despite the turmoil — or perhaps because of it — Americans are overwhelmingly supportive of Obama, who will become the nation’s first African American president, and express confidence in his ability to address the challenges posed at home and abroad.
A recent Newsweek poll released Friday found 64 percent of respondents, including 36 percent of Republicans, somewhat or very optimistic that Obama can “improve the way things are going in this country.” Read the rest at CQ Politics
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Obamas Arrive in Washington Video
The end of the Whistle Stop Tour:
