Awaiting the Transformational Presidency

by Arianna Huffington

Barack Obama 44th President Inaugural Illustration by New Yorker cover artist and bestselling children's book illustrator Harry Bliss.

"On or about December 1910," Virginia Woolf wrote, "human character changed."

We can be much more specific:

"On Nov. 4, 2008, just after 11 p.m. Eastern, America changed" (human character remains rather intransigent).

After eight years in which it has felt like the very foundation of our country was under assault, it is a testament to our democracy's inherent capacity for regeneration our ability to coursecorrect that Americans responded the way they did to a campaign so premised on an appeal to "the better angels of our nature."

A country can change only to the extent that the individuals within it change. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it: "If you wanted to change the world, who should you begin with: yourself or others?"

Our president-elect is obsessed with Lincoln, who changed the country both by changing government policy and by using the bully pulpit to help us change ourselves.

Now it's Obama's turn to pull off this rare presidential double play.

One of the primary ways he seeks to do so is by making a call to service a central cause of his presidency. "We will ask Americans to serve," he said in a signature speech on the subject.

"We will create new opportunities for Americans to serve. And we will direct that service to our most pressing challenges."

And those challenges have never been more pressing in our lifetime. As unemployment heads ever higher, layoffs mount, foreclosures stack up, and local governments gird themselves for a coming wave of service cutbacks and hospital closures, we have metaphorical fires burning all across the country. Fires that threaten to turn into a social conflagration.

In the past, Americans could look to the safety net of social programs put in place by FDR during the Great Depression to mitigate the effects of an economic downturn. But the U.S. has become a far different place since the last major recession: unemployment insurance is less generous, welfare has been scaled back, as have job training and housing programs.

These holes in the social safety net make a commitment to service even more urgent. This is a moment when it isn't enough to look to the government; it's a moment when we need to look to each other and to ourselves.

Obama is tapping into his lengthy e-mail file and list of supporters in an effort to fuel this societal shift. His high-tech outreach was instrumental in getting people across the country to donate millions of dollars and contribute millions of hours working on the campaign. Will it now become a hub for civic action?

We've seen the American people rise to the call of service time and again in times of national tragedy witness the outpouring of money and volunteers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.

After 9/11, Americans showed they were eager to work for the common good, to be called to a higher purpose. It was the best of times amidst worst of times.

Obama's challenge is finding a way to direct this national impulse into an ongoing effort to deal with the dark days that unquestionably lie ahead.

This will take more than soaring rhetoric and online calls to action. Every president pays lip service to service. Even President Bush, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, declared: "We have much to do, and much to ask of the American people." A month later he echoed the theme, saying simply: "America is sacrifice." Of course, the sum total of that sacrifice turned out to be shopping, going to Disney World, and offering tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

Obama must turn his words into action and follow through on his promise to emulate FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, JFK's Peace Corps and LBJ's Vista.

"The ultimate measure of a man or woman," said Martin Luther King, "is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

By reminding us that "our destiny as Americans is tied up with one another," Obama has the chance to do more than salve the economic suffering all around us. He has the chance to help reconnect us to the ideals of America's founding.

From the beginning, America has been dedicated to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But, for our founders, the happiness that was to be pursued was not the buzz of a shopping-spree high.

It was the happiness of the Book of Proverbs: "Happy is he that has mercy on the poor." It was the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.

If Obama can inspire us to include service to others on our to-do list and, in the process, redefine the way Americans view the pursuit of happiness, his will truly be a transformational presidency.

NEWS & CURRENT EVENTS ...