Barack Obama accused of giving partisan inauguration speech [View all]

Source: The Guardian

But before Obama had even left the church, the hard reality of Washington politics began to kick in.

Republican Congressman Pete King said Obama could at least have made an effort to reach out to Republicans. "I thought he could've found some way to be more constructive," King told CNN, adding: "You can still make a case but do it in a more magnanimous way."

Senator John McCain, Obama's presidential opponent in 2008, rounded on Obama, saying it was the eighth inauguration speech he had heard and the first in which a president had failed to reach out his hand to the opposition party.

Obama devoted much of his first inaugural speech in 2009 offering to work with the Republicans but spent most of the intervening years in bitter, debilitating fights with them that have frequently left Washington paralysed. Obama, frustrated by that and emboldened by his election victory, used his inaugural speech to underline his new combative approach, one in which he outlined a progressive agenda that he hoped to push through in spite of Republican opposition.

Conservative commentators joined Republican members of Congress in criticising Obama. Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard accused him seeking "to move the country even further left".


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/22/obama-inauguration-speech-republican-compromise