Obama, child of 2008, father to man of 2013

Harold Meyerson has helped me recognize that in noting the continuities between Obama's second inaugural and his past speeches (2008 and 2009-12), I under-emphasized what's new. Meyerson helps me see more fully the extent to which the speech represents a restoration of ideas Obama expressed in the 2008 campaign. Or rather, an attempt to reboot his implementation of those ideas -- seizing the "gift for reinvention" that he affirmed as an American quality.

It all boils down to what is meant, if anything, by "we are the ones we've been waiting for" (2008) and "my fellow citizens -- you were the change" (2012) and "You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course" (2013).  Here's Meyerson:

On not respecting the past

On the occasion of the Jewish holidays, brooding over whether I would fast on Yom Kippur (I have for most of my adult life but not longer see any reason for doing so, other than dislike of abandoning any discipline voluntarily undertaken), it occurred to me that a passage from a novel, or rather a didactic fiction, has been recurring in my mind on such occasions for more than fifteen years.

It's from Herland, the early 20th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopia of an isolated all-female society that breeds by parthenogenesis.  The women and girls of Herland are uniformly wise, free, maternal, devoted to education and the common welfare.