Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: A historic Inaugural address

What he said:

Conservative or liberal, Obama's 2nd inaugural address was a great speech, one that was well received. Except by ideologue conservatives.

Unusual opening from David Brooks, the conservative:

The best Inaugural Addresses make an argument for something. President Obama's second one, which surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century, makes an argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism...

During his first term, Obama was inhibited by his desire to be postpartisan, by the need to not offend the Republicans with whom he was negotiating. Now he is liberated. Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display. He argued for it in a way that was unapologetic. Those who agree, those who disagree and those of us who partly agree now have to raise our game. We have to engage his core narrative and his core arguments for a collective turn...

Obama made his case beautifully. He came across as a prudent, nonpopulist progressive. But I'm not sure he rescrambled the debate. We still have one party that talks the language of government and one that talks the language of the market. We have no party that is comfortable with civil society, no party that understands the ways government and the market can both crush and nurture community, no party with new ideas about how these things might blend together.

But at least the debate is started. Maybe that new wind will come.

EJ Dionne, the liberal:

President Obama used his inaugural address to make a case ' a case for a progressive view of government, and a case for the particular things that government should do in our time.
He gave a speech in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural and Ronald Reagan's first: Like both, Obama's was unapologetic in offering an argument for his philosophical commitments and an explanation of the policies that naturally followed. Progressives will be looking back to this speech for many years, much as today's progressives look back to FDR's, and conservatives to Reagan's.

Going almost unnoticed was Obama's tribute to voting rights among a relatively short list of big challenges.  http://t.co/...
' @ed_kilgore via web
Richard Socarides/New Yorker:

No one anticipated it, but President Barack Obama used the occasion of his second Inaugural Address to give what was perhaps the most important gay-rights speech in American history. Inaugural Addresses are, by their definition, important and defining occasions, when Presidents set the tone and direction for the coming four years. President Obama used the occasion to make the first direct reference to gay-rights in an Inaugural Address, and he did so with a power and forthrightness we have not heard before, even from him.

Come follow us below the fold for more on this historic speech.