Musings on the inaugural masses

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William B Milam
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
If the US does not confront its serious domestic problems and adopt policies to rectify them, its ability to deal with its serious foreign policy problems will continue to attenuate. The longer these problems continue to fester and inhibit or distort the modernisation of American society, the more enfeebled our foreign policy will become

I am starting to write this almost precisely 48 hours before Barack Obama is due to be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. By the time he takes the oath of office and speaks to us for the first time as our elected leader, whatever I have written will already be printed and, thus, irretrievable. Nonetheless, it will not be terribly risky (and very few will remember, in any case) to speculate on what he might say in his initial address or how he might say it. Relatively intelligent guesses are easy to make, as both his intention to change US politics, and the direction he intends such changes to take, have been clear for some time.

At this point, however, I am as intrigued as much by the logistics of his inaugural as the content of his address. It has been predicted by logistics experts who run such events as inaugurals that four million people will descend on Washington to witness the swearing in and the parade that follows, listen as our new president lays out his hopes, dreams, and plans, and participate in the celebrations of his inaugural that will go on into the morning of the following day. Whether the fragile infrastructure of the nation’s capital will be able to handle a mass visitation of that dimension, or even half that dimension, is a mystery.

I have heard no evidence that the current cold spell will dissuade some of those who plan to come to Washington for the inaugural to postpone their visit until warmer times. The forecast is for the weather to warm up to around freezing for the inauguration. In the past few days, it has been considerably lower than freezing. But most Americans are sceptical of weather forecasts anyway, and Barack Obama’s inauguration has evoked an outpouring of support and hope, particularly among the young who are unlikely to let a bit of cold weather scare them off from “a happening”.

What those who come to the inauguration want to hear, I suppose, are his plans and programmes for a change in the country’s direction and more vigorous and aggressive action to bring a halt to the country’s economic meltdown and physical deterioration. The interaction of the president and the crowds coming to celebrate his inauguration may strengthen both his and the people’s resolve to tackle these problems resolutely and coherently. Washington, the city, may well be the perfect venue for a serendipitous blending of wills.

One idea I am sure he will mention in glowing terms is his plan to use a good part of the fiscal stimulus package he plans for funding reinvestment in infrastructure throughout the country. The infrastructural needs of this city are a good example; they create not only a security nightmare, but are a vivid illustration of a country that is running down its capital at a seriously dangerous rate. The public transport system, the Metro underground and buses, is already severely strained, and will be doubly so on inauguration day. Many doubt it will be up to the task of transporting an additional million or so passengers to and from the inauguration. It is not the Metro personnel that evoke this scepticism, but its aged equipment and rail system. It will have to run for at least two days on schedules which give very little rest to its staff and assume all equipment and track can be used flat out without respite. Everyday riders of the system, given their frequent experiences with breakdowns, wonder if this is sustainable even for two days.

It is possible that the experiences of those visitors who actually make it to the Mall to hear the inaugural address will help them understand better that part of the president’s inaugural address that is likely to focus on the physical renewal of the United States, on his belief that our physical infrastructure — roads, bridges, public transport — and social infrastructure such as public schools, is crumbling from lack of money, maintenance, and timely reinvestment. Potholes dot our roads and ruin our autos, and those who drive to Washington won’t miss that as their cars bump over the city streets. Those who ride the underground or busses to the Mall will confront enormous crowds and annoying delays. If any of those visitors take a wrong turn or a wrong underground train, they could end up in the southeast of the city or other areas where the stagnant income levels of those at the lower end of our socio economic scale and the almost total failure of our urban public education system cannot be missed.

I suspect the president will also speak of political renewal, the need for us to drop the extreme partisanship of the past 25 years and find ways to work together coherently and cooperatively to solve these problems. Here the example in his mind, if not in his words, may well be my home state of California, which is a prefect example of the politics of the past that the president wants to extirpate. Unlike the federal government, which can finance even huge fiscal deficits by printing money, borrowing it from its own citizens (many of whom are reluctant to lend to it right now, even if they have it, which most don’t) or from foreigners, our states cannot run print money, thus have a limited ability, at best, to run deficits. California, which, if it were a country, would be the eighth largest economy in the world, is trying to deal with a $42 billion deficit. But its legislature is paralysed — the democrats won’t agree to cut expenditures and the republicans won’t agree to raise taxes.

I am sure the president will speak of his aims in foreign policy, but there will be little room for him to speak in specifics on the issues of the day. He has been left a very toxic set of problems in which circumstances change almost by the hour. He will have to reserve judgement on the foreign policy issues that will be on his desk on January 21 when he comes to work in the Oval Office — be it the Israeli invasion of Gaza, Russia’s attempts to muscle its neighbours in Europe, the continuing tensions between India and Pakistan, the genocide in Darfur and the serious problems in Eastern Congo, or many other such issues — until he and his administration have had the opportunity to address them pragmatically and on a case-by-case basis. On the other hand, there are foreign policy issues on which he has clearly made up his mind. Iraq is one. Closing Guantanamo Bay and the use of torture are others.

There is one fundamental axiom that I think will underlie his oration on Tuesday, though it may remain unspoken and implicit: if the US does not confront its serious domestic problems — the continuing free fall into economic recession and the concomitant financial meltdown that has frozen credit throughout the economy, and the longer-term but no less necessary need to reinvest in and rebuild its physical infrastructure as well as to strengthen social and human infrastructure including constructing a health-care system that works for everybody — and adopt policies to rectify them, its ability to deal with its serious foreign policy problems will continue to attenuate. The longer these problems continue to fester and inhibit or distort the modernisation of American society, the more enfeebled our foreign policy will become.

William B Milam is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington and a former US Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh
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