I understand that conservatives have their collective nose out of joint because President Obama failed to deliver the inaugural address they had written for Mitt Romney. The Economist's Lexington complains about the President's "partisan" speech:
In his speech Mr Obama painted conservatives as akin to a primitive tribe—intensely united around such totems as climate-change denial or hostility to gay rights, rigid in their belief that government safety nets trap citizens in dependency, and generally prone to mistake “absolutism for principle”. In contrast, Mr Obama used the inauguration to thank and reassure the loose coalition that returned him to power in November. In a cascade of lyrical stanzas he pledged his second term, in turn, to those who depend on public health care and pensions, to those weary of war, to women seeking equal pay, to gays seeking equal rights, to minorities angry about legal hurdles that seemingly exclude them from voting, and to immigrants wanting new lives in America. The president ended with a call for citizens to demand that politicians address that progressive agenda.
Speaking of guns, while Lexington pays President Obama no compliments on the issue, the Republican reader who has found in the column a sympathetic account of his/her grievances will likely stumble over the parentheses in this sentence toward the end: "A confrontation looms, too, over Mr Obama’s (feeble) proposals on gun control, such as curbs on high-capacity ammunition clips or new checks on gun buyers."
Would it have been less feeble to have described a progressive movement from Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall and Sandy Hook?
