Barack Obama’s inaugural address Tuesday will call for a new era of personal responsibility in Washington and will ask Americans to reject the “culture of anything goes.”
America “must once again restore a values system that respects and honors a sense of responsibility,” Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s incoming chief of staff, said today.
“We all have something to give to our country and have an obligation to do that, to return it to its greatness.”
He also forecast that Obama’s historic address will hark back to John F. Kennedy’s charge in his 1960 inaugural address to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
The overriding theme of the address, incoming White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, is “getting our country back on track.”
“We need more responsibility and accountability, certainly in the way our government acts,” he said on today’s “Fox News Sunday.”
“We have to have it certainly in many of our financial institutions that sort of have gotten us to where we are in this economic crisis today.”
Top strategist David Axelrod, who will be Obama’s senior adviser, declined today to preview the speech other than to say it will encapsulate the campaign he has waged for the past two years.
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“I don’t think you’re going to be surprised by what you hear. I think he’s going to talk about where we are as a country but also who we are as a people and what responsibilities accrue to us as a result of that, and what we have to do to move forward,” he said.
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As important and historic as tomorrow’s address is, the Obama team is focused on Wednesday, the day it will begin trying to make good on all its promises.
After a morning prayer service, Obama will huddle with top advisers on the economy and national security and begin the monumental job of pulling the country out of a recession while fighting a two-front war in the age of terrorism.
As soon as Obama is sworn in tomorrow, a handful of aides will get into the White House and begin working – even before the new president has arrived from the Capitol in the inaugural parade.
Already, Obama’s campaign promises are being cataloged.
“I intend to end this war,” he said in July. “My first day in office, I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war responsibly and deliberately, but decisively.”
Advisers say he will do exactly that on Wednesday with a stated goal of pulling troops out of Iraq in 16 months.
“He believes that that is a reasonable timetable,” Axelrod said today, even giving something of a nod to President Bush’s success in stabilizing the country.
“We’ve moved a great distance from the time he started talking about that, and now we’re in an area where everyone agrees that we should be on a path to withdrawing those troops,” he said. “And he is going to begin that process, as promised, on that day.”
But Obama has made very clear since his election that his top priority will be the economy. And his first priority for fixing it is his nearly $1 billion stimulus package he has already begun selling to Congress.
With both chambers under firm Democratic control, Obama will likely get pretty much whatever he wants.
That’s not to say Democrats on Capitol Hill don’t harbor differences of opinion with Obama on some key issues.
Some have already begun pooh-poohing Obama’s plan for middle-class tax relief.
And Obama has even signaled he is wary of raising any taxes on anybody at any income level until the economy perks up.
Many Democrats in Congress can’t wait that long to raise taxes and, specifically, roll back the tax cuts that are the cornerstone of Bush’s economic record.
But Larry Summers, Obama’s pick to direct the National Economic Council, reiterated today that Obama is not keen on any tax hikes right now.
“Our overall focus is going to be on increasing spending,” he said. “Beyond that, there’s going to be a substantial tax cut for the American people.”
churt@nypost.com