Barack Obama: 'New era of responsibility'

By Mark Silva

Barack Obama, with his swearing-in as 44th president of the United States, will call on Americans to embrace "a new era of responsibility.''

In his widely anticipated inaugural address after taking the oath of office at noon, Obama will focus on the economic crisis that the nation confronts, and a crisis of confidence in the future which he will say can only be overcome with a renewed national resolve for greatness.

He will speak of "a new era of responsibility,'' calling on Americans to pick themselves up and "dust'' themselves off.

With a nation at war and economy in turmoil, Obama will rally Americans to confront their crises with "hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.''

Barack Hussein Obama, born of a mother from Kansas and father from Kenya who had their only son in Hawaii, is unique in American history: Becoming the first African-American president of a nation once riven by slavery and racially segregated by law for decades afterward, he will take the oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible before an audience spanning the two-mile length of the National Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial.

At 47, Obama will not be the nation's youngest chief executive -- Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and William Jefferson Clinton were younger at their inaugurations. But Obama has united young and old with his call for "a new declaration of independence'' from divisiveness.

Obama, who campaigned for the presidency with a sweeping promise of "change we can believe in,'' enters office at one of the most challenging junctures in modern American history: In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and with the nation at war on two fronts.

The new president will ask the Congress to approve, within his first month in office, a nearly $1-trillion economic stimulus that promises more than 3 million new jobs in the next few years. At the same time, it will compound an annual national debt which already surpasses $1 trillion before he enters office.

"He is going to be counting on the American people to come together," retired Army Gen. Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state for the Republican President Bush and supported Obama's election, said in an interview with NBC News Tuesday. "We all have to do something to help the country move forward under the leadership of this new president."

Among the many who packed the National Mall on this day: Gloria Washington-Lewis Randall, an African-American from Alabama who spent two and a half weeks in jail after participating in a civil rights demonstration in 1963. Now, at 62, she was joined by her friends waiting to watch the swearing-in on a Jumbotron in the cold. "I'm totally ecstatic,'' she said. "You don't really notice the cold out here. It's a warmness that's coming up. Because no more will we be called black or white. We'll be called Americans."

Obama and wife Michelle attended a morning service at St. John's Church, an Episcopal church one block north of the White House where Bush has worshipped during his two terms in office. The church choir sang, "This Little Light of Mine.''

Bishop T.D. Jakes, senior pastor at The Potter's House church in Dallas, told Obama and the congregation: "The problems are mighty and the solutions are not simple," Jakes said, "and everywhere you turn there will be a critic waiting to attack every decision that you make. But you are all fired up, Sir, and you are ready to go. And this nation goes with you.''

At 9:55 am EST, Bush hosted the Obamas for coffee in the Blue Room of the White House before traveling to the Capitol for the noon swearing-in-ceremony and Obama's inaugural address. Afterward, Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and others would dine on seafood stew, pheasant and duck in Statuary Hall of the Capitol before joining the inaugural parade that would travel along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

"Today is about victory,'' said House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) "This is a victory for democracy, for all Americans who see their hopes and dreams in Barack Obama, who now feel that they have a voice, and a person with the vision to sail this ship through the rough waters all of us are experiencing.''

Obama will enter office with a pledge for an "orderly'' and "responsible'' withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq after nearly six years of war that has claimed more than 4,000 American lives. At the same time, he has agreed to an escalation of U.S. military force in Afghanistan, which he and his advisors consider "the real front in the war against terrorism.''

A Harvard-bred attorney and former constitutional law professor and community organizer from Chicago who served less than one term in the Senate, the former Illinois state lawmaker will assume office as the culmination of a dream which he himself has billed as "audacious:'' A candidate with a "funny name'' who was unknown to much of the nation just five years ago.

Obama shed his anonymity with the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004.
"I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,'' Obama said at that convention in Boston. "Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: "'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'''
The upstart Democrat who captured the imagination of many of his party's leaders even as he was just beginning his own stint in the Senate remained a long-shot for the nation's highest office when he announced his candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10, 2007.

"I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness - a certain audacity - to this announcement,'' Obama told a crowd filling the square on a frigid winter day. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change. ''

He entered a contest for the Democratic Party's nomination, one of many in a crowded field of candidates. At the time, much of the party's conventional wisdom pointed toward the nomination of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a former first lady.

Yet, starting with an upset victory in the opening party caucuses of Iowa in January 2008, where the Obama campaign team displayed an organizational prowess backed by formidable fundraising, the candidate turned the tables on not only the party's front-runner but also the rest of the pack. In the end, with a long-fought battle for delegates needed for nomination, Obama outran Clinton in June.

"Four years ago,'' Obama told some 80,000 people filling a football stadium in Denver on Aug. 28 for the acceptance of his party's nomination, "I stood before you and told you my story, of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to...

"We meet at one of those defining moments,'' he said, "a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.''

In Republican Sen. John McCain, the GOP's early-settled presidential nominee, Obama faced a much older, more seasoned senator with a military hero's story to boot. McCain, who had spent nearly 25 years in Congress from Arizona, also had served more than two decades in the Navy - including five and a half as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after his bomber was shot down over Hanoi. The Naval Academy graduate also had sought his party's presidential nomination before, in 2000, losing to George W. Bush, and this time had returned to fight the campaign of his life.

At first, the war in Iraq stood as a defining difference between the Democrats and Republicans. McCain had entered the contest as an unbowed supporter of the American military mission in Iraq - particularly the "surge'' of forces which President Bush ordered. Obama, who had spoken out against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 before he was a senator, campaigned with a pledge to bring troops home within 16 months after election.

Yet, as the campaign progress, the protracted war, unpopular among most Americans, was eclipsed by economic calamity.

And by the fall of 2008, amid signs of deepening trouble among the nation's financial institutions, the economy consumed the campaign. McCain, who had allowed early on that economic issues were not his strong suit, also had maintained, along with Bush, that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong.''

As the election neared, polls found that Americans found Obama better-suited than McCain to confront the economic crisis. And by Election Day on Nov. 4, Obama had not only waged the best-financed campaign in American history, raising close to $1 billion for the effort, but also amassed support in enough states - including states that had long voted Republican, such as Virginia and Indiana - to win an Electoral College landslide.

"It's been a long time coming,,'' Obama told tens of thousands filling Chicago's Grant Park on election night, "But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.''