Obama ushers in a time of hope

Along New York state Route 23, between tiny Craryville and slightly larger Hillsdale, farmland has been plowed into giant letters spelling O-B-A-M-A, each character outlined with bright blue lights.

At night, the lights twinkle against the snow, as if talking back to the stars.

This year, the stars are calling for recession, war, and political gridlock. America’s answer is Barack Obama, and the notion that one man’s ascension to the presidency can, almost by itself, alter a nation’s mood and thereby change its fate.

Obama campaigned on hope and change, in that order, and America is ready to find out if Obama’s magic is real or just fairy dust. Historians and political observers aren’t particularly optimistic.

“It could all evaporate quickly,” said Steve Gillon, the former Yale and University of Oklahoma historian, referring to the good will built up by Obama.

“What Obama has to do is more than words of hope and inspiration and yes-we-can – he needs to say ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and then go out and do it competently,” advised Michael Corgan of Boston University.

But to the millions of people converging on Washington for the inauguration, Gillon and Corgan have it backward: Reality is bad enough that people need to be inspired to go out and change it. And inspiration is what people want, need, and even expect out of the new president.

“The mood sets the stage,” said Brian Corr of Cambridge, a former Obama volunteer who is driving with his family to the inauguration. “All that rhetoric he’s been criticized for is making people believe that change can happen. He can set the tone, and it is about us getting out there to make it happen.”

For Obama, the inauguration is his personal defining moment. From the start of his presidential campaign in early 2007, people gravitated almost instinctively to him, investing him with all their expectations. But even as Obama went from state to state, and people kept coming, it was never clear whether his appeal was based on anything that he could actually deliver.

It was widely noticed that Obama’s political program included nothing different from the standard Democratic agenda embraced by all his primary-election rivals. But he certainly made people believe in it more strongly than the other candidates could.

“America, we are better than these last eight years – we are a better country than this,” he announced at the beginning of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

And the straightforward confidence of his words – an indictment so sweeping that it washed over George W. Bush to implicate the whole country – was impressive. Someone confident enough to openly challenge the country that he wanted to lead was, perhaps, worthy of the ultimate confidence.

But the Obama of the fall campaign was different from the Obama who won the Democratic nomination. As if to counter perceptions that his appeal was based on soaring rhetoric, he ran a cautious campaign, based on criticisms of the eight years of Republican rule. On that basis, given the vast unpopularity of President Bush, he was almost guaranteed to win.

As it turned out, his status as the nation’s first African-American presidential nominee provided more than enough excitement to compensate for his muted, disciplined fall campaign. When he finally won, there was a wave of enthusiasm that struck even the conservative media, who saw fit to congratulate the nation on breaking the ultimate racial barrier, evidence of the underlying goodness of the American people.

The election of the first black president was indeed a monumental accomplishment, shared equally by Obama and his voters. But it now belongs to history. Any further excitement will have to be generated by Obama alone, by his intrinsic ability to rally the nation.

While Washington obsesses over the dauntingly large items on the legislative agenda – a massive bailout plan, an $825-billion stimulus package, an historic overhaul of healthcare – there is reason to believe that the actual cure to the nation’s ills will be faith in its leadership.

And while such faith can be a value in itself, it also can help cure the economy.

“Most of the economy is based on consumer spending,” said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

“If Obama can get people feeling better, that’s half the battle right there, because people will start spending money. He comes into office with so much good will, he has a chance to make people feel better, but it will all depend on consumer spending.”

There is some evidence to support the idea that support for a president can, by itself, ease economic worries. But whether the benefit is actual – as in consumer spending – or merely psychological, is unclear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and, in legend at least, the nation rallied and pulled through the Great Depression, floating on a raft of New Deal programs. Ronald Reagan, assuming office in a time of runaway inflation in 1981, offered the opposite elixir – tax and spending cuts – but a similar buoyant confidence.

It’s worth noting that neither Roosevelt nor Reagan brought about a quick turnaround. The Depression dragged on through much of the ‘30s, and Reagan’s policies prompted a deep recession, after which the economy boomed for most of the remainder of his administration.

There is no doubt that confidence in Roosevelt and Reagan gave the country the patience to wait out the economy, but there’s plenty of doubt about whether it actually hastened the recovery.

“When Roosevelt came to power, it was so unprecedented to believe that a president could use the power of the government to create jobs,” Gillon said. “The mere suggestion that the president cared about people was enough to sustain people’s expectations at least through 1936. But Obama doesn’t have that much time.”

Gillon, for one, sees Obama as a figure more comparable to Bill Clinton than Franklin Roosevelt, even if the economic crisis of today is more reminiscent of 1933 than 1993.

“In terms of the coalition he put together, the message, the style of leadership – it’s more Clintonian than Rooseveltian,” Gillon said, pointing out that after an initial burst of optimism about Clinton, the nation lost confidence very quickly after a couple of early stumbles.

And today there are, indeed, many portents of a hard road ahead.

Obama’s choice of Cabinet members, including a lot of familiar, well-credentialed politicians, suggests a return to Clinton-era centrism, not a bold new direction. Obama’s widely praised speeches, which are often derivative of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., convey the keep-the-faith steadfastness of Lincoln and King, rather than the glowing optimism of Roosevelt. The early signals from a Congress controlled by his own party are worrisome – suggesting that political wrangling as usual will commence almost as soon as Obama takes his hand off Lincoln’s Bible.

In the Middle East, Obama’s ability to provide a new face for American leadership is impeded by a war in Gaza that suggests, if nothing else, the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the lack of good options for the United States.

But against all that is Obama himself – a politician so skilled as to break a racial barrier no one thought would fall so quickly, to run a seamless campaign against a very experienced field of candidates, and to keep winning over new converts even as he turned to the hard work of governing.

Obama’s election was a special moment, and now he must show himself to be special. But the message from the legions of people coming to Washington – like the one etched into the field in upstate New York – is hopeful.

America is ready to believe in Barack Obama. – Boston Globe/The New York Times News Service