Obama's Second Inauguration - NYTimes.com The consensus on TV this morning was that Barack Obama's second inauguration wasn't as amazing as his first. The crowd was much smaller. People were just not as excited as they were four years ago. But, call me sappy, when the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," I felt pretty much the same thrill as on Jan. 20, 2009. Mr. Obama took over a country gravely damaged by his predecessor. In fact I was convinced in 2008 that whoever succeeded President George W. Bush could only last one term. He got a raw deal, and then he helped prevent the Great Recession from turning into the Second Great Depression. Wall Street doesn't like Mr. Obama, but corporate profits have soared in the last four years. He ended the war in Iraq, and he's on his way to getting us out of Afghanistan. He passed health care reform. Along the way, he faced a Republican Party that was not only implacable in its opposition to his agenda but also hostile toward him personally (no doubt in part because of his race.). Republican super PACs spent tens of millions of dollars trying to run Mr. Obama out of office. They failed - and not just because Mitt Romney was a bad candidate. Mr. Obama offered a contrast to the Republicans' ideology of intolerance and the vision of a government dedicated to helping the powerful and ignoring the powerless. Vice President Joseph Biden was sworn into a second term by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, the first woman of color ever appointed to the Supreme Court. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who stunned the right wing by voting to uphold Mr. Obama's health reform law, administered the oath to the president. Mr. Obama's second inaugural speech will not go down in history with Lincoln's or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's, but it wasn't a disappointment. "We are made for this moment and we will seize it," he said, "so long as we seize it together. For we the people understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America's prosperity must rest up on the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. Repeatedly deploying the phrase "we the people," Mr. Obama tried to appeal to Americans' better natures. "We are true to our creed," he said, "when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own." And equality, for this president, explicitly includes equal rights for gay Americans. "Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law - for if we are truly created equal then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well," Mr. Obama said. It's worth pausing to recognize how extraordinary it is that, sixteen years after DOMA, an American president alluded to same-sex marriage in his inaugural address. I was, personally, upset that Mr. Obama did not discuss gun control. I hope that was not a sign of a lack of commitment on his part to the ambitious proposals he put forth last week. He did see fit to mention climate change and immigration reform. But perhaps he wanted to avoid a topic that breeds division. Despite the bitterness of the last four years, Mr. Obama's message was that we can't succumb to ideological differences. "Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time - but it does require us to act in our time," he said. For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. It is still amazing to have a president who acknowledges that imperfection will be with us always even as he insists on action - and who invited Beyoncé to sing the national anthem at his inauguration. She absolutely hit it out of the park.