Inauguration 2013: How was Obama’s speech? Two writers discuss

Tuesday at 10 a.m., staff writer Hector Tobar and I will do a live video chat about President Obama’s presidential inauguration from a literary point of view. Last week, Tobar wrote about the lessons Obama might draw from previous inaugural speeches; we’ll talk about how we thought he did, and also discuss Richard Blanco’s commemorative poem.

Such conversations come up around every inaugural, which are, among other things, showcases for a president’s acuity with words. Think of John F. Kennedy, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winner, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with his stirring declaration that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.�

Obama, however, is different: I’ve long thought of him as the writer’s president. His 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father� — published, unlike JFK’s “Profiles in Courage,� before the start of its author’s political career — is perhaps the most open book I’ve ever read by a national leader, establishing Obama in three dimensions, as a complex, and even contradictory, human being.

We’re not accustomed to seeing such vulnerability from our presidents, but this is what makes Obama transformational in so many ways. And yet, it sets a high bar for him any time he has to make a statement that is supposed to move us, that is less about policy than rhetoric.

FULL COVERAGE: 57th presidential inauguration

That’s one of the points of an inaugural address — not only to make a policy statement but to appeal, as Abraham Lincoln suggested in his first such speech, to “the better angels of our nature.�

Did Obama pull it off? How does his second inaugural rank? Please join us Tuesday morning to find out what we think.

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