[Editor's note: We invited some of the historians who have worked on our Milestone Documents encyclopedias to share their opinions about Barack Obama's inaugural address. Click here for part 1. Below is part 2.]

Chester Pach
Ohio University

There are echoes of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy in Barack Obama’s inaugural address, but the message is very different and the vision breathtaking in its ambition. If Obama comes close to achieving his goals, his will be one of the most important presidencies in American history.

The parallels with Reagan are obvious. Until the current economic crisis, Reagan came to office facing the worst economy since the Great Depression. In his first speech as president, Reagan told his fellow citizens that they confronted “an economic affliction of great proportions” that had been in the making for “several decades” and that would “not go away in days, weeks, or months” but would “go away.” As he began his presidency, Obama saw “a badly weakened economy” arising from the “greed and responsibility” of some individuals and “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” Obama acknowledged that today’s economic challenges will not “be met easily or in a short span of time, . . . but they will be met.”

For Reagan, righting the economy meant lifting what he thought was government’s stultifying hand. For Obama, meeting the current crisis requires using government more effectively. For Reagan, in the stagflation of the early 1980s, government was not the solution to the nation’s problems; government was the problem. For Obama, the question is not whether government is too large or small “but whether it works.” Obama is no “tax and spend” liberal, to use one of Reagan’s favorite “terms.” Instead, he is someone who thinks that American institutions–public and private–need to change in fundamental ways to deal with a devastating recession that is certain to get worse. Reagan wanted to reduce the size and scale of government. Obama wants to transform government. Both presidents were–and are–committed to sweeping reform, but of very different sorts.

Like Kennedy, Obama appealed to the commitment, the engagement, and the selflessness of the American people to solve the nation’s problems. Until Obama, Kennedy was the last president who asked the American people to put the nation ahead of self-interest and to sacrifice for the common good. The words we recall above all others from Kennedy’s inaugural address are memorable not only because of their eloquence but also because they have become so unusual: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” President George W. Bush asked us to shop and travel after the 9/11 attacks and then persuaded Congress to cut our taxes as we embarked on a war on terror. Obama never used the word “sacrifice,” but, like Kennedy, he summoned us to “our duties to our nation and our world.” Like Kennedy, who challenged Americans to travel to the moon by the end of the 1960s, not because it would be easy but because it would be hard, Obama proclaimed that “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Obama, however, is not Reagan or Kennedy, but a president in very different circumstances with a soaring vision of what he hopes to accomplish. His words on January 20 were in many ways sobering. He gave us many reasons to expect more hard times, difficulties, and perils. Yet he wants to do far more than revive the credit markets, put people back to work, and lift our spirits. He wants to “lay a new foundation for growth,” transform the way government does its work, remake America’s role in the world. Kennedy wanted to wage the Cold War more vigorously; Reagan wanted to restore the balance between government and the people. Obama wants to take action that will “define a generation.” From the current crisis may come some of the most sweeping changes that Americans have ever experienced.

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Bradley Skelcher
Delaware State University

It is clear as to why President Obama looks to President Kennedy for inspiration. Both were firsts facing similar challenges. For Kennedy, it was the Cold War engaging the U.S. in a struggle for global supremacy against the Soviet Union. Kennedy also faced a troubled economy when he first took office. During the final years of the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. economy had taken a down turn. There was a growing upsurge of nationalist revolutions around the world rising up against Western colonialism. The similarities continue between the two eras. Thus, when President Obama calls for a “new era of responsibility,” it harkens to the time when Kennedy proclaimed, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

In his inaugural speech, it is clear that President Obama is changing the course of the country in both domestic affairs and foreign affairs much as President Kennedy attempted to do. President Obama is also calling upon Americans to sacrifice for their country, as President Kennedy had done in an earlier era that he called the New Frontier. Americans have pioneered and settled this New Frontier. Now, President Obama is calling upon Americans to take the reigns of leadership, but with that comes the responsibility or accountability entailed in this role.

President Obama has ushered in a new era on January 20, 2009, one that is no less daunting than when President George Washington took office ushering in a new era in world history in which citizens won the right to govern themselves as their natural right. President Abraham Lincoln ushered in a new era of freedom for all Americans and started the country down the road to achieving justice and equality for all, thus fulfilling a promise of the American experiment in democracy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt preserved the capitalist economic system by moving the country toward economic equality–or at least equal opportunity. President Lyndon B. Johnson moved the country toward an era of social equality through his war against poverty and racism. President Obama in many respects represents the end of an era as he pointed out in his inaugural speech and the beginning of a new one of hope and the belief that America can change and for the better. I wish President Obama the best and also hope that we can accomplish the promises of America. This too is my American Dream.