Presidnent Obama: A fundamental America duty to provide “hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice”:

John Nichols at The Nation appeared on The Ed Show tonight, very enthused about President Obama’s Second Innauguration speech. Here he is in his Nation column.

 

Barack Obama, the president who publicly swore his second oath of office on the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., used his inaugural address to chart an arc of history from the liberation movements of the sixteenth president’s time through the civil rights movements of a century later to the day on which hundreds of thousands of Americans packed the National Mall to cheer for the promise of an emboldened presidency.

Obama charterd that arc in a remarkable soliloquy that spoke of a fundamental America duty to provide “hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice”: