This Inauguration Day Could Be the Start of Something Big

Thursday will be the 55th inauguration of an elected president since 1789. The swearing-in ceremony is one of our oldest and happiest traditions. Every four years, we rewind the congressional clock, reset the presidential hands and, in Thomas Paine’s expression, “a new era for politicks is struck.” It is an American paradox. We make these new beginnings in an old-fashioned and habitual way. In place of Leon Trotsky’s failed idea of permanent revolution, we have created a process of permanent reform and continuing renewal.

It is never quite as Paine had hoped, that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But often on Inauguration Day, Americans share a mood that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers celebrated in the depth of the Great Depression, with a wonderful song by Jerome Kern, just in time for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1937: “Take a deep breath! Pick ourselves up! Dust ourselves off, and start all over again!”

What wonderful things we could do if Republicans and Democrats could dance together like Astaire and Rogers -- even if some of us would have to dance backward.

That bipartisan dream often comes over Americans on Inauguration Day. George Washington set the tone in his first inaugural in 1789 with its promise: “no local pledges or attachments, no separate views nor party animosities.”

The most memorable phrases were in Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.... We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.”

The most noble were the simple words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865 and its great theme of union restored, “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

When presidents-elect spoke these words, defeated candidates responded with symbolic gestures in the same spirit. After the hard-fought election of 1824, a defeated Andrew Jackson rose at the inauguration and extended his hand to President John Quincy Adams in a small act that inspired the republic. After the cruel contest of 1860, Stephen Douglas reached out to hold Lincoln’s hat, while the new president fumbled with his inauguration speech.

That same bipartisan spirit is abroad in Washington today, though it is struggling for life. We heard it on Jan. 3, 2005, when President Bush greeted new members of the Congress. We saw it in Congress the following day, when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was photographed reaching out graciously to Republican Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. It ebbed a few days later in a sharp skirmish over the electoral vote, but what if we could nourish the bipartisan tone of Inauguration Day and keep it growing?

Dream on, you say. But scattered evidence suggests that a bipartisan spirit is reviving in the United States. Not perhaps in Texas or Massachusetts, but Maine’s former governor, Angus King, an independent; its current governor, Democrat John Baldacci, and the state’s two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, have worked closely together to create highly effective bipartisan leadership that is a model for the nation.

It has been happening even in Washington, with the 9/11 commission. The inspired leadership of Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, their many colleagues and the 9/11 families have taught us that a few determined individuals can make a difference in the spirit of our politics.

Think what we might do if we could build on the bipartisan spirit of Inauguration Day, with these models as inspirations.

Bush’s deep determination to take us toward partial privatization of Social Security would be an opportunity. The first step would be think about the problem in a larger context. Most of us have been saving for our old age in different ways. Together, we have accumulated a Social Security trust fund of about $2 trillion, private pension plans totaling $4 trillion and mutual funds approaching $8 trillion. It’s a big system, diverse and already more than 75% privatized and 85% personalized. Private investment accounts in Social Security could be another step forward if we could take it without heaping a heavy burden of debt on our children and grandchildren, and without shrinking benefits to seniors who desperately need them and without wrecking other social programs in the process. We could do all that if we work together in a more flexible way without ideological rigidity and party strife.

In the same spirit, we could do something constructive about the economy and our ailing transportation system. We’ve tried to solve this problem in two ways. One method was a heavy-handed system of public regulation. The other combined deregulation and extreme free-market economics. Both failed. Throughout our history we have had more success with a third approach -- a flexible and highly pragmatic system of mixed enterprise, with both public and private effort. That’s the way we built the great transcontinental railroads. It is how we constructed our interstate highways and developed our aviation industry. Much might be done if we could steer a middle course between rigid ideologies to the left and right.

Think what we could do together in the war on terrorism. We are facing a mortal threat to our free institutions, not only from Islamic militants such as Al Qaeda but from secular terrorists linked to the Baathist parties in Iraq and Syria and many other groups. From a centrist perspective, leadership of the Democratic Party has failed miserably to confront this danger, while Republican leaders have confronted it in the wrong way -- with overreliance on unilateral action, insufficient troop strength in Iraq, divisive doctrines of preemptive war and a stubborn refusal to raise taxes to finance it. The greatest error was to fight a war in defense of liberty and freedom while committing gross and repeated violations of individual civil liberties and human rights.

It is not too late for us to begin again. We could move forward by returning to the first principles on which this republic was built, by reviving our dynamic tradition of liberty and freedom, by recovering our gift for mixed enterprise and, most of all, by restoring our traditional “policy of humanity.” We have done these things many times before.

Could it actually happen? Many will think that these thoughts are not what Damon Runyon would call a betting proposition. But with the growing revulsion against party strife in Washington, and the mood of an inaugural moment, we have a fleeting opportunity to make another new beginning in the old American way -- another chance to start all over again.