Obama's History Begins Tomorrow

So history will be made tomorrow. At 11:30 AM, Senator Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. I suppose I always assumed there would be a woman president before an African American was elected to the oval office. In September of 2007, Representative Jim Marshall all but guaranteed to me that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. Nonetheless, her new boss takes office tomorrow.

The Obama campaign and inauguration have been purposefully aligned with Abraham Lincoln. From the announcement of his campaign for president on the steps of the old state capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, the same spot where Lincoln announced his campaign, to the use of the bible from Lincoln’s inauguration, Obama has made an overt effort to tie himself to Lincoln. And certainly there are clear threads connecting the two men. Being elected the first black president from the same state as the man who issued the Emancipation Proclamation does give Obama better claim to comparisons with Old Abe than many who come before him.

But comparisons of Obama to a past president might be better directed at FDR. Based on his intentions to spend billions on stimulus packages, infrastructure investments, and job creation programs, Obama certainly sees himself as brokering the next “New Deal” for Americans. Obama arrives on the scene at a critical time. Like every recession, America’s economy can and will recover on its own. But Democrats and the president elect are determined to spend billions that our nation doesn’t have in the name of economic recovery.

Perhaps nothing can foretell of how the new president and Democratic leadership will approach the country’s problems any better than the price tag of this inauguration. Four days of celebrating the coming of Obama , including the favorite foods of Abraham Lincoln, will costs all of us a significant chunk of $150 million, a new record by a considerable margin.

So unlike Clinton and McCain, Obama proved to be superior at campaigning. But promises made along the campaign trail, many to the masses expecting a democratic president and Congress to fix all of their problems, have now come due. Huge stimulus packages will create worse deficits that may well prevent the hundreds of billions needed to fulfill Obama’s campaign promises.

The St. Petersburg Times is counting Obama’s campaign promises, currently at 510, and tracking action on each at http://www.politifact.org/. Rather than leaning on memories of the sixteenth president, Barack Obama now gets to make history of his own.