A Place Called Hope.(Barack Obama's inauguration)

T he Inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States had much to interest those whose attention may not have been held by the historical and global import of the occasion. The trains, birthdays, weather, coincidences, glitches, music, dresses, hats, kids, magic screens, and fun facts--news anchors enjoyed announcing the capital's Great Toilet Shortage, for instance, which meant one portable facility for every six thousand people, while at the same time worrying idly that their constant repetition of that off-putting statistic would, in fact, put people off--were easily enough to keep such people in front of their televisions for much of the four days of hoopla. The Inauguration really lasted a little more than two weeks, beginning with Obama's arrival in Washington on January 4th, the night before his daughters started school--one of those hurry-up-and-wait situations which had cable anchors vamping for a couple of hours while cameras showed us static pictures of the airport, and then played and replayed a brief shot of the President-elect descending the stairs from the plane and tucking into a waiting car. What didn't need to be said then was that this image would very soon be bookended by its counterpart, George W. Bush's walk up the stairs into the plane that would take him back home, to Texas, on the very day that Obama was sworn in--a moment that itself seemed to be alive and eager to arrive, looking at its watch, tapping its feet, ready for the curtain to part so it could take the stage.

There was so much resonance in every element of the inaugural ceremonies and celebrations that sometimes the harmonic buzzing was almost too much. On Saturday the seventeenth, three days before Inauguration Day, Obamapalooza kicked off with a train ride that took the President-elect and his family from Philadelphia to Washington, with stops in Wilmington, to pick up Vice-President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, and Baltimore, and a couple of what were called "slow rolls" along the way. The ride echoed Abraham Lincoln's entry into Washington, and, as every civic-minded, TV-watching citizen knows, 2009 is the two-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's birth and the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. The train ride took place two days before Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and on the day Michelle Obama turned forty-five. I'm here to tell you, though, that watching a train ride on TV is not very interesting, especially since cameras never got inside the car carrying the Obamas and the Bidens and the "everyday Americans," some forty of them, whom they'd invited along for the ride. What we did get to see was CNN's Candy Crowley in one of the press cars, and some blurry video of the view from there. This is where the fun facts come in. From the bottom of the screen on CNN, where the crawl used to be, and where there is now an only slightly more stately dispensing of data in a series of stacked boxes, we learned that the ride was a hundred and thirty-seven miles long, that Lincoln's trip, from Springfield, Illinois, took twelve days, and that he gave a hundred speeches during the journey. In the studio, the CNN reporter Tom Foreman stood next to one of those magic screens that CNN has and, with flicks of his fingers, made a map of the train's journey morph into aerial photographs that showed bridges and buildings along the route, and pointed out the security challenges. That kind of thing was actually all too interesting, as was finding out exactly where the train would cross the Mason-Dixon Line and hearing that Lincoln's train, as it approached Washington, was guarded extra heavily, because of assassination threats. If there was truly any thrill to Obama's train ride, it wasn't getting to see him on his way to make history; it was that he made it to Washington in, shall we say, good health. Just as nervous fliers may think they can keep a plane in the air by being hypervigilant, many of us think we can keep Obama safe by watching him every second; in a way, it was reassuring not to see too much of him on the journey--it meant that he was O.K., that we didn't have to worry about him.

It also meant that the correspondents and the commentators had a lot of airtime to fill. CNN's people had parked themselves outdoors in Washington, in order to bring us closer to the inaction. Bundled up in heavy coats and scarves and hats, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Soledad O'Brien, and Roland Martin seemed mostly to talk about the weather, though we also got to hear that O'Brien had come down from New York on the same train as Beyonce. Over on MSNBC, Chris Matthews was his usual combination of extremely embarrassing and kind of insightful. Getting giddy ...