Inauguration 2009: Obama the president

Barack Obama’s first words as president aim far higher than the skies above the crowds that came to see him.

He spoke of hope, of virtue, of a moment that would define a generation.

Obama made a direct appeal to all Americans to take charge of shaping their own destiny: to their hard work and honesty, to a return to responsibility.

“We are ready to lead, once more”. Barack Obama

Before him was a sea of faces and waving flags cheering the words of the man who has taken just eight years to rise from relative obscurity to become leader of the most powerful nation on earth.

At times the tone was stark, as if to reflect the enormity of the task ahead. For those who doubted his ambition, he urged them to remember “what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.”

As for the economic turmoil, a warning to those who have grown rich on the proceeds of others’ misery.

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favours only the prosperous.”

But a promise too, of a nation determined to renew its image in the world, to reach out to its enemies, and those whose respect and trust it has forfeited.

“We are ready to lead, once more,” he declared.

Obama: the presidential inauguration in numbers.

By the time he finished speaking the crowd was roaring its approval – many were moved to tears.

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favours only the prosperous.” Barack Obama

The long hours in the cold, the security nightmare, for now forgotten amid a sea of waving flags and a common sense of hope.

Then, a brief luncheon in the Capitol and another nod to history with a deliberate echo of Abraham Lincoln’s meal.

More ceremonials followed as President Obama made his way to his new home in the White House at the head of a procession 150,000 strong.

The Lincoln connection

Jon Snow reports on how Barack Obama’s inauguration is suffused with references to the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.

He is everywhere in this inauguration, even looking down over Springsteen’s shoulder at yesterday’s mammoth concert.

I’ve been talking to Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, a completely brilliant book that gives great insight into Lincoln himself and into America’s historic struggle with slavery, civil war and the establishment of the United States.

It’s the book that Obama said that, next to the Bible, he would want to guide him in his administration.

Ms Kearns Goodwin has spoken with Obama on several occasions in the last six months, not least as Obama was building his own “cabinet of rivals”.

Among the crowds

Before sunrise tens of thousands of people began streaming into Washington DC, eager for a ringside seat to history.

With the city already a gridlock of closed roads and barricades, Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy met onlookers who have travelled from all over the world to witness Obama’s inauguration.

From the West Wing to the West Wing

Actor Richard Schiff, aka Toby Ziegler from the West Wing, tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy that even more glamorous and even more idealistic than the fictional world portrayed in the hit series.

The final two series of the show saw a charismatic ethnic-minority candidate rise from outsider to democratic president - eerily foreshadowing the Obama campaign. 
And in real life, Richard Schiff was a keen supporter of the vice-president elect, Joe Biden.

"People still say, I wish you guys were still in the White House, I miss the show, and I say, just turn on C-Span, our national political channel that televises the normal everyday governing that we do here," he told Channel 4 News.