A Rhapsode and a question mark: the Obama inauguration, placed in history.(Barack Obama)

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FUSSY rituals, ubiquitous kitsch, Aretha Franklin doing her thing, Rick Warren doing his thing, the weather (cold enough to be challenging, not inclement enough to be painful), but above all the crowds: Deduct what you will for partisan fervor, racial pride, and media tub-thumping, the inauguration of Barack Obama was still an impressive piece of popular theater, less for the spectacle that was put on than for the performance the audience gave by showing up.

One small but essential part was played by the outgoing Bushes. Departing presidents do not always play so well with others: Both Adamses, John and John Quincy, were so outraged by providence's rebuke to them (and to the nation that had betrayed them by voting for someone else) that they did not even attend the inaugurations of their successors, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson respectively. The Bushes were a class act. George W. Bush was also palpably relieved to be handing off to someone else.

Most of our inaugurations and inaugural addresses have been forgettable. It is the glory of our system that they can be. Still we have had our share of drama.

For sheer euphoria, nothing, not even 2009, tops Washington's first inauguration, in 1789. His trip, from Mount Vernon to New York City, then the capital, was a triumphal progress through six of the thirteen states. Twenty-five thousand people cheered him in Philadelphia, out of a population of 28,000. Rep. Fisher Ames, one of the rising orators of the age, judged the inaugural address with a pro's eye and ear. Washington, he wrote, was "actually shaking," and his voice was "so low as to call for close attention." But these shortcomings only added to the drama of the occasion.

Disaster made other inaugurations dramatic. On the day of Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration, in 1861, Winfield Scott, the old Mexican War hero who was lieutenant general of the Army, posted himself in a small carriage on a side street, in full uniform, ready for any emergency. What Scott feared was assassination, followed by riot and panic. Two weeks before Franklin Roosevelt's first inauguration, in 1933, he narrowly missed being shot by an anarchist in Miami Beach. The bullets instead killed Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who had followed Roosevelt to Florida to get right with the president-elect (Cermak had not endorsed him early enough at the 1932 convention). Even without the whiff of murder, these inaugurations were made grim enough, thanks to political and economic chaos.

Incoming presidents like to advertise themselves as avatars of change. If they are only the next figure to pop out of a clock, what is the glory in that? Sometimes the new president can make good on that claim. Thomas Jefferson came into office in 1801 promising to undo the legacy of America's first majority party, the Federalists of Washington and John Adams; though he spoke emollient words in his inaugural--"We are all republicans, we are all federalists"--in private he vowed "to sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection." For public consumption, he proposed to cut taxes, honor states' rights, and demilitarize, defending the nation with gunboats instead of frigates.