Inauguration Day 2009

Inauguration Day 2009. Today Barack Hussein Obama becomes the 44th man to ever be the President of the United States of America. That’s a big deal. I am curious to watch the festivities today, but unfortunately the increase in workload after our ‘reduction’ last week will make that impossible, that along with my new year’s resolution not to watch T.V. I hope to get a transcript of the speech later and go through it. Although reading through one of Obama’s speeches really takes away the best part of the speech. The man is a very gifted orator.

I haven’t spent too much time focusing on this inauguration, but I have to say that I have been a little surprised about the things that I have read. I understand that there will probably be a record number of people attending the inauguration; reports are that upwards of two million people will be in attendance. Given the national importance of the event, the historical importance of the event, and the unheard of coverage of the event, security is naturally a significant issue. Given those circumstances, I think the price tag for the day is a little high (reports are around $170 MILLION), given the financial mess that the country is in right now. Unlike Bush’s second inauguration I have not heard reporters clamoring about the cost and about how many armor plated Humvees could be purchased with the money. Maybe given the number of armed security guards they have brought into D.C. this could be part of Obama’s job creation/retention program.

The second and definitely more significant thing that has struck me as odd about the whole inauguration is the ‘theme’ of it. Isn’t a Presidential Inauguration a theme of its own? Why does it have to be Lincoln themed? The whole idea is just strange? I don’t think Lincoln had a Washington themed inauguration. Considering this has added significantly to the cost of the whole inaugural, it seems like they would have gone with something more along the lines of ‘shabby chic’ or maybe ‘middle class’ inaugural.

In any case. At 3am tomorrow morning all of the inaugural events will be over and Barack H. Obama will no doubt be exhausted from the festivities. He’ll be woken up tomorrow and given briefings on the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terror threats around the world, the tenuous cease fire in Gaza, and no doubt the state of the White House renovations that the first family has requested.

My prayers go out to him. He has a difficult task at hand.