Why They’re Coming to D.C.
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 17th, 2009 5:38 am by HL
Why They’re Coming to D.C.
WASHINGTON — Our nation’s capital will survive the financial meltdown, the deepening recession and the plethora of foreign crises from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Whether Washington will survive Tuesday’s inauguration, however, is an open question. Rarely has a city that cockily considers itself the center of the political universe been seized by such a powerful combination of giddiness and anxiety. Barack Obama will be, after all, the 44th president of the United States; it’s not as if we haven’t gone through this drill before. But this inauguration seems to have been amplified by a feedback loop of historical importance, security paranoia and sheer numerical overload — a combination that has strained Washington’s ability to cope.
The Central Front
WASHINGTON — With all the preparations for the biggest, most expensive and most restrictive inaugural celebration in history, this is probably not the time to remind our president-elect of things he said and wrote, promises he made, or commitments he pledged. Perhaps one of his new aides will clip and save this for his perusal later next week. Candidate Obama repeatedly described Afghanistan as “the central front in the war on terror.” Sometimes he included neighboring Pakistan, which he occasionally threatened to attack. After a brief visit to Afghanistan in July 2008, he said that “one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made strategically” is failing “to finish the job.” He used a sports metaphor — “we took our eye off the ball” — to accuse his predecessor of being “distracted by Iraq.” Then he pledged that if elected, he would “once and for all dismantle al-Qaida and the Taliban.” That is what we were told by once-Sen., now President-elect, soon-to-be commander in chief Barack Obama. But that’s not what he is saying today.