What President Obama could say today

President Obama delivers his second inaugural address today on the same day we celebrate Dr. King's birthday (even though his real birthday is on January 15). It is fitting and even obligatory for him to invoke Dr. King's rhetoric in this speech, to call on the nation "to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed--we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."As Joseph Stiglitz demonstrates so concisely in today's New York Times, we are falling desperately short of even a reasonable level of equality in this country. The last time the United States was this unequal economically was in the 1920s, a degree of inequality which helped to pave the way for the Great Depression.

But in terms of what to emphasize in today's speech, Douglas Brinkley, the distinguished historian, says it best in the Room for Debate column in today's New York Times: 

"No parent should have to worry that their child will be murdered by assault weapons when attending school. No Latino should think that a knock-on-the-door means deportation. No worker should fear that Social Security will be raided or health care benefits incrementally stripped away under a desire for a balanced budget. And no citizen in the Age of Climate Change should wonder whether the federal government will help them rebuild if a natural disaster devastates their community.

"Back in 1937, F.D.R. said that, 'The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.' I hope the president speaks out fiercely for the 30 million in poverty, the unemployed, the downtrodden and the middle-class families that just can’t make ends meet. If one American is hungry, he should say, than we’re all hungry."

These are the concerns that President Obama should stress, that would inspire us to be at our best, that would help us finally to live out that American creed and allow our government to mirror, in a way that could give us new pride and new hope, the "better angels of our nature."