A Look Back: Obama can only improve on first inaugural speech

Perhaps President Obama's inaugural address today should be viewed as his Mulligan Speech.

Today, he gets the chance at a do-over after a 2009 inauguration that was considered a letdown, even by some of his most ardent supporters.

Here was this young, vibrant president -- the first black man to capture the White House -- and, with 2 million energized people looking on from The Mall and tens of millions more watching on TV, his remarks produced not one memorable line.

A president known for his soaring oratory on the campaign trail, Obama instead chose to deliver a sobering message, warning that times were perhaps even tougher than Americans believed.

"That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood," he said in an early section of the speech. "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

"Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet."

That doesn't sound much like: "All we have to fear, is fear itself."

A State of the Union speech is usually heavy on details, a laundry list of policy proposals, but an inaugural address -- especially for a newly elected president -- is supposed to be so much more. It's the country's leader, standing tall, outlining his vision, his hopes, for the nation.

In January 2009, with the new administration realizing that the financial mess was much worse than previously thought, perhaps David Axelrod and David Plouffe could not muster an inspirational message for their man.

Instead, we got this:

"Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.

"These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

"What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."