Republicans call Obama inaugural speech too partisan. Right or wrong? (+video)
(Read article summary)President Obama's speech defended liberal touchstones, such as a strong role for government, but it raised issues that could divide GOP ranks, such as gay marriage, equal-pay legislation, and even amnesty for illegal immigrants.
On the first working day of President Obama’s second term, many conservatives are complaining that Mr. Obama’s inaugural address was a paean to liberalism and big government that presages four more years of Washington partisan warfare.
The right charges that Obama’s speech was all about the limits of individual action and the virtue of “collectivism" and that it ignored the biggest problem in US public life: the growing national debt.
“[Obama] hopes to reorient the American mainstream and locate conservatives outside it,” writes Rich Lowry at National Review Online. “He wants to take the Founders from the Right and baptize the unreconstructed entitlement state and the progressive agenda in the American creed.”
Republican lawmakers were generally more circumspect but expressed disappointment that Obama’s speech didn’t contain more talk about reaching out and working with the other side.
“I was more hopeful that you’d hear more bipartisanship,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) of California, House majority whip, in a Tuesday interview on CBS.
What phrases is the right worried about here? Many Democrats were thrilled by Obama’s second inaugural address. They saw it as an unvarnished defense of liberalism and the role of government in American society.
