Krauthammer: Obama Doesn't Need Your Adulation

Barack Obama’s inaugural address was a demonstration of his most striking quality: His utter lack of neediness. The speech so abandoned his trademark soaring rhetoric, so failed to excite or inspire, that it had to be a deliberate strategy, writes Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post. “He’s Bill Clinton, master politician, but without the hunger. Clinton craves your adulation. Obama will take it, but he can leave it, too.”

After promising the moon on the campaign trail, the "newly sober" president's speech was “a stunning exercise in lowered expectations,” writes Krauthammer. To right America’s battered ship, he offered hard work and sacrifice, not miracles. “When candidate Obama said, ‘It’s not about me, it’s about you,’ that was sheer chicanery. But now he means it, because he really cannot part the waters.” (More Barack Obama stories.)