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Joe Klein puts this nicely:
And let it be recorded that Obama's first act as President was to correct Chief Justice John Roberts, who managed somehow to mangle the 35-word oath of office, misplacing the word faithfully, as in "faithfully execute the office of President ..." Roberts then mangled it a second time, Obama raised an eyebrow, and Roberts moved on, a bumpy beginning and something of a metaphor: one of the new President's functions will be to correct the mistakes of George W. Bush's benighted tenure. Obama made that very clear in his sharply worded address, which contained few catchphrases for the history books but did lay out a coherent and unflinching philosophy of government. Nearly 30 years after Ronald Reagan heralded the onset of his conservative age by saying "Government is the problem," Obama announced the arrival of a prudent new liberalism: "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." Conservatives assume such tasks — employment, health care, retirement — are the province of the market. We have had 30 years of paeans to the wonders of free enterprise, but Obama made it clear that markets are not an unalloyed good: "This crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."But enough of the inaugural. It's time for governing. And as Spencer Ackerman notes, Obama has actually done a surprising amount of that already. "Take a look at his first not-even-48 hours in office," writes Ackerman. "He's suspended the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, a first step toward shuttering the entire detention complex. He's assembled his military commanders to discuss troop withdrawals from Iraq. He's issued a far-reaching order on transparency in his administration that mandates, among other things, a two-year ban on any ex-lobbyists working on issues they lobbied for. And now he's shutting down the CIA's off-the-books detention complexes in the war on terrorism." It's amazing how much evil can be undone with the stroke of the executive's pen.
