Someone on CNN just got rounded on by his colleagues for saying that he thought Obama’s speech lacked a truly memorable line on a par with “ask not what your country can do for you” or the oft-misquoted “We have nothing The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And I suspect he’s right: it was lacking a money shot, as it were. But I think that may be deliberate. For while the tasks facing Roosevelt and Kennedy in those speeches were straightforward, Obama’s was highly complex - too much so to be summed up in a single, memorable phrase.

Roosevelt’s task was to reassure a nation in the midst of crisis. That reassurance - a message of, to use the modern slogan, Hope - was all that people needed to take away from his inaugural. For Kennedy, the task was also simple: to stir a complacent nation into a greater level of engagement with the Cold War, the battle against poverty, and assorted other challenges, and in doing so add a sense of history to what was in fact a squeaked-through election victory.

By contrast, Obama’s speech had a double aim: not only to reassure the nation that it could weather the current crisis, but also to impress the seriousness of that crisis on the nation. Remember, when Obama first began selling his message of change to the nation, the financial crisis had barely begun. The problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, of failing schools and crumbling infrastructure, were those he promised to deliver America from. As the election continued, the crisis became central to Obama’s speeches and the number one issue for voters. But the true depth of the crisis has become clear only since the election. Just these last few days, the dire news from Bank of America and Citigroup show the bottom has not yet been reached.

Yet the true scale of the crisis, it seems, hasn’t truly hit home. Roosevelt addressed a people who had seen three long years of decline. They knew the extent of their woes, and were desperate to hear good news. While the period since Obama’s election may have seemed interminable, it was merely weeks, much of which has been spent on business-as-usual bickering about the Warren selection, the Burris farrago, Geithner’s tax returns and the like. In recent days Obama’s hopes to quickly secure his stimulus package have been stalled by increasing conservative concern about waste, partly a result of the supposed “failure” of last autumn’s bailout.

All of this is reasonable scrutiny. But none of it is commensurate with a sense of dire emergency. Plans on the scale of Obama’s require a sense of urgency of the kind which was seen after September 11. So the speech had a dual purpose: to provide the sense of hope which we associate with Obama, but also to lay out clearly to Americans, perhaps for the first time, the full scale of the challenge ahead.

Hence the blunt tone of the first few lines. Declaring himself “humbled by the task before us,” he spoke of taking the oath “amidst gathering clouds and raging storms”. The summing-up of the state of the union that followed was remarkably bleak:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood.  Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.  Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.  Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered.  Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. 

This from a man who was ridiculed last year as a happy-clappy peddler of loose promises! Even when the tone of the speech turned to the positive future, the tone was of gritty determination rather than high-flown dreams.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.  They are serious and they are many.  They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.  But know this, America -  they will be met.

At times, the tone was almost chastening. Obama blamed the financial crisis on “our collective failure to make hard choices.” His main biblical reference was almost damning: “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” For an America that has been coddled with praise for years by a simplistically patriotic president, this is a remarkable change of tone.

The next siginificant passage reminded this “childish” America of the sacrifices that brought us to this point. 

It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. 

This is the voice of a serious man with a deep sense of history. This is not feelgood stuff.

As the speech went on, Obama talked in more hopeful terms about his goals, and the shopping list is daunting:

We will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

But strikingly, the climax of the speech brought the tone back to one of marked uncertainty. More than once, he associated the current crisis with the question of the survival of the United States itself. First he recalled Thomas Paine’s words, read aloud to George Washington’s troops before one of the final battles of the War of Independence:

In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”*

Then in his closing paragraph he openly, albeit briefly, raised the spectre of the end of the American experiment:

Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. [My emphasis]

This rhetoric is not aspirational. If this is an example of the audacity of hope, it is a hope tempered with a profound sense of foreboding at the scale of the task ahead. If this is inspiration for the future, it’s also deeply aware of the journey that has led us here. And if this is a message of reassurance for the people, it’s also one of responsibility.

It’s a nuanced message. A mature message. Even a conservative one. It reinforces, once again, my suspicion that Obama may truly be what he appears to be: a uniquely serious, thoughtful and determined man, potentially a remarkable leader.

These times require no less.

Read the full text of Obama’s inaugural speech

*Paine’s original words were “to meet and repulse it.”