Trying to Walk Forward While Facing Backwards

When the UK telegraph says that Obama's inaugural speech was bad, you know it was real bad. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/alex_spillius/blog/2009/01/20/barack_obama_inauguration_his_worst_speech

As Alex Spillius wrote on the UK telegraph blog, "The delivery, as ever, was first class, but the message wasn't clear enough and the language not insufficiently inspiring," he continues on to write, "Obama seemed weighed down by the past, and failed to seize the moment."

That last sentence describes the problem of this entire election cycle.

Obama's speech didn't an awful lot of talking about history, but didn't amount to anything that would make it. Writing a memorable inauguration address is difficult. There have been some articulate presidents whose inaugurations are well forgotten.

Lincoln, a very articulate man, is better known for his second inaugural. And does anyone know anything about inaugural addresses given by Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, or even Bill Clinton? It really does take a lot to make a historic address.

However, Obama had all the material to make his address historic. He is coming in during a war, and economic crisis and he's the first black to hold the office of President of the United States. He can't blame the press either, as they spent to whole week talking up this moment and history, and the whole afternoon after the speech proclaiming that Obama's words would be etched in stone.

But does anyone really believe that?

No, Obama's speech fell short of what it ought to have hit. And Alex Spillius hit the nose right on the head; Obama was stuck in history and didn't seize the moment.

President Obama has spent the last four months saying that he's JFK, no he's FDR, no no, he's Abraham Lincoln... combined! Obama has the JFK Hollywood image, he's going to rebuild our infrastructure like FDR, and he came from Illinois and rode a train to Washington DC just like Abraham Lincoln. You see the problem with Obama's speech really started before he ever gave it.

It surely says something of our generation that we're always looking back, and although generations past have looked back to learn from history, they were always able to seize the moment.

Abe Lincoln wasn't impersonating anyone when he took his train to New York, FDR, though basically copying and pasting many of the Hoover administration’s policy in the infrastructure building, tried to make it sound like his own, and John Kennedy was being John Kennedy. Although each of these men must have had their role model, they were able to rise up and seize the moment by themselves.

Obama is not the only recent politian with this problem. Early in the Republican race Mitt Romney had to compare everything he did to Ronald Reagan. Mitt, I love Reagan, but two things buddy. First, you're no Reagan, and two, you're you.

And so although Obama's inaugural may not have been as good as the hype it did serve to demonstrate the dilemma that will decide the future of this nation: Are we a nation who looks back to the past nostalgically or do we have leaders living now capable of taking the moment and succeeding.

Jason Bentley is just a punk college kid who is attending Brigham Young University.