Thursday will be the 55th inauguration of an elected president since 1789. The swearing-in ceremony is one of our oldest and happiest traditions. Every four years, we rewind the congressional clock, reset the presidential hands and, in Thomas Paine's expression, "a new era for politicks is struck." It is an American paradox. We make these new beginnings in an old-fashioned and habitual way. In place of Leon Trotsky's failed idea of permanent revolution, we have created a process of permanent reform and continuing renewal.
It is never quite as Paine had hoped, that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." But often on Inauguration Day, Americans share a mood that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers celebrated in the depth of the Great Depression, with a wonderful song by Jerome Kern, just in time for Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration in 1937: "Take a deep breath! Pick ourselves up! Dust ourselves off, and start all over again!"
Inauguration Day -- A Jan. 16 Opinion article on bipartisanship credited the song "Pick Yourself Up" to Jerome Kern. Dorothy Fields wrote the lyrics and Kern wrote the music.
That bipartisan dream often comes over Americans on Inauguration Day. George Washington set the tone in his first inaugural in 1789 with its promise: "no local pledges or attachments, no separate views nor party animosities."
The most memorable phrases were in Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural: "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle
The most noble were the simple words of Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration in 1865 and its great theme of union restored, "with malice toward none; with charity for all."
When presidents-elect spoke these words, defeated candidates responded with symbolic gestures in the same spirit. After the hard-fought election of 1824, a defeated Andrew Jackson rose at the inauguration and extended his hand to President John Quincy Adams in a small act that inspired the republic. After the cruel contest of 1860, Stephen Douglas reached out to hold Lincoln's hat, while the new president fumbled with his inauguration speech.
That same bipartisan spirit is abroad in Washington today, though it is struggling for life. We heard it on Jan. 3, 2005, when President Bush greeted new members of the Congress. We saw it in Congress the following day, when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was photographed reaching out graciously to Republican Speaker J. Dennis Hastert. It ebbed a few days later in a sharp skirmish over the electoral vote, but what if we could nourish the bipartisan tone of Inauguration Day and keep it growing?
