It’s always interesting when, oh, a billion or so people watch or listen to a speech and come away with very different impressions. From the published reviews of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, that may have been the case yesterday.
One of the more positive takes was by John Heilemann of New York magazine, who thought the speech demonstrated Obama’s “strategic mastery.” John Judis of The New Republic, on the other hand, was disappointed, calling the speech “a hodgepodge of themes, injunctions and applause lines.” At the same site, Noam Scheiber thought the speech was actually quite coherent thematically, but stylistically uneven, ranging from high rhetoric to wonkery.
Virtually everyone thought the speech’s somber tone was appropriate, albeit a contrast to the upbeat Obama speeches everyone remembers from the campaign.
The one big negative to the Inaugural (perhaps inevitable in a highly secured event for 2 million people) according to many accounts was a serious logisitcal snafu that kept thousands of ticketed guests from getting anywhere near to the event. If you want to read an especially unhappy account of that problem, Greg Levine of Firedoglake has served one up.