If the layout of this week’s issue is a bit sloppy (or at least more sloppy than usual) you can blame it on Obama. While you are reading this several days after one of the most self-consciously historic days in memory, your editor was putting the paper together on Tuesday with one eye on his job and one eye on video streaming from Washington, D.C.

Your editor does not multi-task well.

As the commentator tried to fill dead air during the hours in which spectators filled the empty spaces on the mall it was clear what was on the schedule was a slide show of iconic images albeit with a protean quality – would it be a day of triumph or would chaos rule? (It turns out Washington is a big enough town for both, as the largest crowd in the history of the city arrived despite the reported breakdown of the mass transit system.)

There is no doubt that much has been invested in the idea of Obama as savior – Abe Lincoln, F.D.R. and M.L.K., Jr. all rolled into one. The man who has already healed a nation rent by partisan division with his openness to dissent; who absolved the sin of slavery with the words, “so help me God” and will end a financial crisis with the wave of a pen.

The idea is fun to lampoon and deserves a full measure of our scorn because it is a myth that denies the force behind the new president’s popularity not that he is here to save us but that he is here to lead us. 

In his first speech as president, Obama sought to convey a singular message: there are sacrifices to be made. In order to get our great experiment working again we must rediscover a common purpose for the idea of America and for that purpose to have true value and utility it must require work and sacrifice.

He did not dwell on what the corollary of this charge must be: that we as a society have drifted away from any sense of common purpose. That the troubles the country now face are largely self-inflicted and born from infantile self-indulgence: we got greedy and we got lazy – either is trouble but together they are downright dangerous.

As he told a cheering crowd of millions they will work harder for less for the foreseeable future, the camera occasionally rested on the former occupant of the White House.

There is much that George W. Bush did and failed to do in his eight-year tenure that exacerbated America’s slide toward bloat and gluttony, but he can’t be blamed for all or even most of it. Three million people standing for hours in a freezing wind to cheer a speech that was anything but cheerful (hopeful, yes) was more than eight years in the making.

This is generational. This is epochal.

In many ways Obama’s speech came seven-and-a-half years too late. His call for national sacrifice and a common purpose rings loudly because it is a call we have not heard in a generation or more.

As the camera paused on Bush’s bored gaze, it became clear Obama’s words would have been supremely appropriate on another self-consciously historic day, Sept. 11. But we didn’t hear them. We heard the opposite: Keep doing what you’re doing. That will show them.

Obama’s speech and the reception of his administration reflect what every president in my lifetime has failed to recognize.

That America and Americans needs a purpose.

–Ward Peck