So how many of you found yourselves wondering today what the inauguration of Willard Mitt Romney would have looked and felt like? Aside from the certainty that the crowd would have had a different, er, complexion, and the equal certainty that we’d see a lot of images and interviews of quite naturally excited LDS folk, a Romney inaugural would have been treated by the conservative media and perhaps much of the MSM as a restoration, a return to the Natural State of Things after the four turbulent years of the Obama administration. True, Washington’s social lions might have been a little unsure as to whether a tee-totalling Mormon would be a big improvement over the society-shunning Obamas with their insulting unwillingness to attend dinners and cocktail parties. But by and large, official Washington, for all the heavily Democratic voting habits of its actual citizens (and those of most of the nearby suburbs), tends to prefer Republican regimes (or at least those before and after JFK’s) as orderly and appropriately upscale.

What I most wonder about is how far the organizers of, and the principal figure in, a Romney inauguration would have gone to tame the vengeful hordes of Tea Folk, in person and via the available media, who would have viewed the ejection from office of the hated Obama as a world-historical event and a first step towards a more thorough-going Restoration of the pre-New Deal Republic. Mitt himself would have had to do something in his inaugural address to redeem his endlessly repeated promise to “repeal Obamacare on my first day in office.” Would he have signed an executive order crippling implementation of the Affordable Care Act before, after, or indeed even during his speech (maybe with a tart word to the Chief Justice immediately after the ceremonial swearing-in)? And would he have boldly promised “the 47%” freedom from their wretched dependence on the federal government?

It’s interesting to speculate, but not for that long. Romney has already been thoroughly forgotten by his own party, so let’s leave him to his hard-earned privacy.

The president’s soaring rhetoric about equality and his stirring lines about women, GLBT folk, and immigrants may well be what history remembers about his second inaugural address. But the brief passage about the New Deal/Great Society legacy may be a better indication of how he’s trying to position himself for the big battles with Republicans just ahead:

We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work hard or learn more, reach higher.

That’s a classic “New Democratic” formulation of the relationship between unchanging progressive goals and flexible means for achieving them. In this context, it also represents a signal that Obama will probably not obey any course of action that requires placing the big entitlement programs off-limits to modifications if he can get a big fiscal deal to his liking. But this doesn’t open the door to “reforms” that amount to an abandonment of the social safety net:

But while the means will change, our purpose endures. A nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American, that is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed.

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.

But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative.

They strengthen us.

They do not make us a nation of takers. They free us to take the risks that make this country great.

So: there’s a categorical rejection of the idea that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are somehow corrosive of the national spirit or unaffordable in an era of public-sector austerity. But Obama’s also leaving the door open to changes in the entitlements (perhaps just minor tweaks, but maybe something more significant like more means-testing) that he can at least try to defend as faithful to the progressive spirit that created the programs in the first place.

It’s interesting that the address made no reference to his most important first-term accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps it goes without saying that this initiative is off-limits to negotiation, although a commitment to its root-and-branch repeal remains a litmus-test promise for Republicans. But all in all, the address continues the rhetoric line that characterized most of the president’s speeches during the 2012 campaign: a combative but very real openness to deal-making on terms of his own.

As noted yesterday, this is both Inaugural Day and a federal holiday (when Lite Blogging is normally followered here), so I’ll continue to do posts as developments dictate—particularly a couple more on the text of the president’s relatively combative Inaugural Address. Here are some mid-day news morsels, both about and beyond the Inauguration:

* Another horrific massacre involving military weaponry, as troubled, camo-clad teenager in New Mexico kills five family members, including his father, a minister.

* Paul Krugman assesses Obama’s “Big Deal.”

* At Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum argues American leaders not even beginning to grasp enormity of scientific and technological change.

* At TNR, Ben Birnbaum explores (unlikely) scenario of tomorrow’s Israeli elections forcing Netanyahu to political center.

* At Plum Line, Jamelle Bouie makes case Obama did better in redeeming promises of first Inaugural than he’s given credit for.

And in non-political news:

* Pong! Atari’s US operation files for banktrupcy.

Back with more thoughts on the Inaugural Address shortly.

Without question, the single most surprising passage—not so much in its existence, but in its length, central placement, and unambiguous language—in the president’s second inaugural address involved climate change:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But American cannot resist this transition. We must lead it.

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

Critics will say Obama wouldn’t have dared utter those words during the 2012 presidential campaign—particularly the final weeks when it sometimes seemed the presidency would be determined almost entirely by the coal counties of Virginia and Ohio. But this is what second terms in office are for, and although we have no particular evidence Obama will (or can) make action on climate change a presidency-defining priority, he’s certainly off to a good start in simple truth-telling.

This morning Amy Sullivan offered an interesting tweet about the Inaugural benediction:

When Rev Luis Leon gives the benediction at the Inauguration today, he’ll be the first mainline Protestant to pray at the event since 1989.

Without going to the effort of tracking down the prior record of benedictions, I’d hazard the guess that a very high percentage of those given prior to 1989 were mainline Protestants. So perhaps others should have the opportunity to catch up.

But I suspect Amy—like me, and like Barack Obama, a mainline Protestant—is alluding to the fact that “liberal Protestants” have become remarkably invisible in public life of late, derided by conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics alike as a dying breed of spiritually compromised unbelievers and half-believers (if not, as Rick Santorum called us, people who are “gone from= the world of Christianity” entirely). Yeah, there are about 45 million Americans belonging to denominations affiliated with the mainline National Council of Churches, but you wouldn’t much know that from the dismissive contempt (also applied to liberal Catholics) of conservatives and the indifference of secular media, who often buy the idea that only conservatives are “real Christians.”

I understand the feelings of some, perhaps many, readers that inaugurations should be secular events, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they were. But if we have to have a benediction, it’s nice to see one delivered by someone who can listen to Obama’s speech without feeling horror at all the equality-talk.

I don’t have the text of Barack Obama’s second inaugural address just yet, but it will pretty be interpreted as an unambiguous, even combative, progressive reclamation of patriotic traditions and vocabulary. That was made obvious when he began with the Declaration of Independence, the document that the Tea Party Movement has sought to make an eternal charter for absolute property rights, rigidly limited government, Christian Nationalism, and freedom from mutual responsibility. Obama boldly and repeatedly identified equal opportunity as the basic point of the Declaration, and the basic content of “American exceptionalism.” Just as boldly, he made the quality of our “collective action,” not its absence, the measure of our fidelity to national traditions, specifically touting climate change, equal opportunity for women and GLBT folk, a fair immigration system, and succor for people struggling to survive as immediate challenges that no manner of “different opinions” can wish away.

I’ll have more to say about the speech later, but whatever it lacked in empty rhetorical uplift it more than adequately supplied in what someone once called “the audacity of hope.”

Those of you who have been reading the new January/February issue of the Washington Monthly are well-attuned to the issues raised by Susan Saulny’s front-page piece in today’s New York Times:

The Rev. Greggory L. Brown, a 59-year-old pastor of a small Lutheran church, committed himself to ministry and a life pursuing social justice on April 4, 1968 — the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain by an assassin’s bullet.

And four years ago, like so many African-Americans around the country, he saw Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency as nothing short of a shocking validation of Dr. King’s vision of a more perfect union, where the content of character trumps the color of skin. “I was so excited when he was giving that first inauguration speech,” said Mr. Brown, of Oakland, Calif. “I could feel it in my bones.”

On Monday, when President Obama places his hand on Dr. King’s personal Bible to take a second, ceremonial oath of office, he will be symbolically linking himself to the civil rights hero. But Mr. Brown, along with other African-Americans interviewed recently, said their excitement would be laced with a new expectation, that Mr. Obama move to the forefront of his agenda the issues that Dr. King championed: civil rights and racial and economic equality.

The new issue of the Monthly has an extensive series of articles on the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and what can be done—sometimes with more, sometimes with less race-consciousness—to combat it in areas ranging from housing to education to health care to criminal justice to the economy.

No one can expect Obama to pursue all these avenues of racial progress against generally united Republican opposition. But there is a potential agenda that simultaneously addresses racial inequality while reflecting a strategy of what Simon van Zuylen-Wood calls “targeted universalism”—which is perhaps necessary for America’s first African-American president. It’s probably worth remembering at this moment that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s great accomplishment was to make the plight of his people in the Jim Crow South and the informally segregated North a concern of all Americans by simply asking the country to live up to its own much-proclaimed universal values. The question is whether a re-elected Barack Obama can do the same, or instead preside over an administration of some great accomplishments but too many lost opportunities.

Here, from AP, is a detailed schedule of today’s Inaugural events:

11:30 a.m. EST: Ceremonial swearing-in, Capitol Hill

The order of the program:

Musical selections: The U.S. Marine Band

Musical selections: P.S. 22, Staten Island in N.Y., and Lee University Festival Choir, Cleveland, Tenn.

Call to order and welcoming remarks: Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Invocation: Myrlie Evers-Williams

Musical selection: Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir

Oath of office administered to Vice President Biden: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Musical selection: James Taylor

Oath of office administered to President Obama: Chief Justice John Roberts

Inaugural address: President Obama

Musical selection: Kelly Clarkson

Poem: Richard Blanco

Benediction: the Rev. Luis Leon of St. John’s Church, Washington

The National Anthem: Beyoncé

2:35 p.m. EST: Inaugural Parade

Viewing stands and bleachers are lined along Pennsylvania Avenue

The Obamas and Bidens participate in a parade featuring floats and vehicles representing about 60 groups.

6 p.m. EST: The Commander in Chief’s Inaugural Ball

Washington Convention Center

The gala honors service members and their families.

6:30 p.m. EST: The Inaugural Ball

Washington Convention Center, Halls A, B and C

Tomorrow the official events wrap up with the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral at 10:30 AM EST.

For MLK Day (and also Inaugural Day), here’s Mahalia Jackson performing “We Shall Overcome.”

Over the weekend, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Frederick Harris, a political science professor at Columbia, which argues that Barack Obama has failed to adequately address “the persistence of racial inequality,” such as the “stagnant poverty, disparate incarceration rates and educational gaps affecting African Americans.”

Coincidentally, the excellent new January/February issue of The Washington Monthly is devoted, on the eve of Barack Obama’s second inauguration, to the theme of “race, history, and the condition of minorities in America today.” There is a ton of fantastic stuff in it, but the piece that really directly addresses Harris’ op-ed is reporter Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s Obama article, “A Great President for Blacks?”

Van Zuylen-Wood very much answers that question in the affirmative, and it’s instructive to examine exactly where and how he differs from Harris. But first, a little about Harris’s piece. Its peg is the is amazing coincidence that tomorrow, President Obama’s inauguration and the Martin Luther King holiday will converge. Harris compares Obama to MLK, and unsurprisingly, Obama is found wanting. Harris contends that Obama has “spoken less about poverty and race than any Democratic president in a generation,” and argues, persuasively, that MLK would have condemned Obama’s national security policies. But his main complaint seems to be that Obama is not doing enough to decrease racial and economic inequality.

Van Zuylen-Wood, on the other hand, doesn’t so much critique Obama for the things he hasn’t done as examine the things he has. He cites many specific Obama administration policies that have disproportionately benefited African-Americans, from the jobs that were saved by the stimulus, to health care provided by the ACA, to education and Justice Department initiatives. It’s a solid, well-reported article, and I’d say he’s got the better of the argument.

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Besides Monsignor Meth, the other irrestistible WTF story of the week was, of course, the Manti Te’o fake dead girlfriend saga.

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o continues to adamantly maintain that he had absolutely no idea that his supposed girlfriend Lenny Kekua was fake; he claims he was catfished. This seems highly implausible, and various hypotheses about what really happened abound. I’m kind of liking the “Te’o is gay-o” theory myself; Te’o both belongs to a religion (the Mormon Church) and plays for a sport that is homophobic, and the Kekua fiction could have provided a distracting cover story for a gay affair.

But whether, and to what extent, Te’o was in on the hoax is much less important than a bigger question, which is, why is it that the sports press and sports fans cared so much about this story? Why did they find the idea of a young woman dying so tragically, in the prime of life, and a young man using her death as an inspiration to achieve great things, so very entertaining?

Feminists who have written about the Te’o hoax have made the point that while Notre Dame officials showed such touching concern over the fake dead girlfriend, they showed no sympathy whatsoever for a real young woman named Lizzy Seeberg, who in 2011 committed suicide after allegedly being sexually assaulted by a member of the Notre Dame football team. No one was ever punished in that case — both the alleged perpetrator of the assault and his friend, who sent Seeberg threatening texts warning her not to pursue the case, got off scot-free. Moreover, the Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger has reported that several months after Lizzy Seeberg’s death, another young woman at Notre Dame said she was raped by a member of the football team. However, the second woman never officially reported attack; after being barraged by texts from other players warning her to keep quiet, she refrained from pressing a criminal complaint.

This suggests a pattern of callousness about sexual violence at Notre Dame. And it’s not just at Notre Dame: a similar callousness seems to be widespread in football. For example, there’s the infamous case involving an alleged rape by members of the Steubenville, Ohio high school football team. There was the murder last year by Kansas City Chiefs’ linebacker Jovan Belcher of his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, followed by his suicide; much of the sports press’s coverage of the case indulged in victim-blaming and classic domestic violence denialism. And of course, in 2011, there were the shocking revelations that beloved Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky had, for decades, been systematically sexually abusing young boys, and that Penn State football officials, including head coach Joe Paterno, enabled the abuse. And these are only the most recent examples. There have been many others over the years. This 1989 case, which occurred in a suburb close to the one I grew up in, was particularly horrendous, and rightfully became infamous. But there are countless other examples — I’m sure you can come up with your own.

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This is good news: today on CNN’s State of the Union, one of Obama’s top advisers, David Plouffe, said he thinks there’s “‘no reason’ immigration reform shouldn’t move through Congress this year.” He’s also optimistic about passing gun control, but thinks it may take longer.

This points to an interesting question: how much can we expect from an Obama administration in the second term? Conventional wisdom holds that re-elected presidents face the prospect of a second term curse and usually cannot get much done.

But Paul Light, the scholar who has written the standard work on presidential agenda-setting, has argued that in fact, the best time for an administration to pursue its most ambitious proposals is at the beginning of the second term. The start of the new term, Light says, is when presidential capital tends to be at its peak. By that time, the president has spent enough time in the office to become good at the job, to learn how to move legislation through Congress, etc. At the same time, the president’s effectiveness hasn’t yet been weakened by mid-term elections or lame-duck status.

I thought Obama’s one real shot at passing big, important reforms would be his first year, and certainly, with the ACA, he achieved that. But who knows, he may be able to get more done in the second term than many of us had thought. It does bother me that we are not hearing a peep from the administration about climate change legislation or labor law reform. Realistically, though, legislation addressing those issues, and many others that are also extremely important, don’t have a prayer of passing in the Republican House. But change on immigration and guns may be in the works, and would be very welcome indeed.

The New York Times’ Opinionator features a great piece by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz about a subject that gets far too little attention: the relationship between economic inequality and the wretchedly slow pace of our alleged economic recovery. Stiglitz points to four main reasons inequality is, as he puts it, “squelching” our recovery:

The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth.

[Snip]

Second, the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

Third, the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks.

[Snip]

Fourth, inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable.

Stiglitz also notes that, contrary to the myth of America as a land where anyone can make it, social mobility is actually much higher in countries like Sweden, Canada, France, and Germany. He also highlights this shameful statistic:

More than a fifth of our children live in poverty — the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece

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On Wednesday, Pauline Phillips, better known to the world as Dear Abby, passed away at the age of 94. For decades, Abby, along with her twin sister Ann Landers, was one of America’s best-loved advice columnists. Like Digby, I was a Dear Abby reader from a very young age. I enjoyed her down-to-earth wit and I learned many valuable lessons from her about tolerance, compassion, and decency.

Though she didn’t address politics in her column, Abby, a Jewish Midwesterner, was a liberal Democrat, and I think that rubbed off on me as well. I got my liberal ideas from somewhere, and they definitely didn’t come from my conservative parents!

Abby helped to break new ground in writing about issues that were rarely discussed openly in America at the time, subjects like drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, sexual abuse, and sexual assault. She also suggested counseling and psychotherapy when appropriate, long before Middle America began to widely embrace these practices.

Abby was also a pioneer when it came to gay rights. In their obituary, the gay website The Advocate pays tribute to Abby as gay-friendly. Perhaps the best example of this is her response to the following 1979 letter, which is quoted in the New York Times obit:

Dear Abby: Two men who claim to be father and adopted son just bought an old mansion across the street and fixed it up. We notice a very suspicious mixture of company coming and going at all hours — blacks, whites, Orientals, women who look like men and men who look like women. This has always been considered one of the finest sections of San Francisco, and these weirdos are giving it a bad name. How can we improve the neighborhood? — Nob Hill Residents

Dear Residents: You could move

R.I.P. Abby. You will be missed.