"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer." - Barack Obama, Victory Speech, November 4, 2008

Yesterday was Martin Luther King's birthday, which is America's only national holiday to honor an American citizen. The day before, which was Sunday, the incoming Obama administration staged an Inauguration Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial around the theme "We Are One," which was also the theme his presidential campaign. As several of the speakers -- including the president-elect -- noted, the Lincoln Memorial was the site of Martin Luther King's historic civil rights march and his famous dream for the American future. The president-elect reiterated that dream -- that Americans would judge each other by the content of their character and not their racial or ethnic identity. Today America welcomes Barack Obama as the first black president in its 232-year history.

How should conservatives think about these events?

First we have to recognize and then understand that whatever happens in the Obama presidency, this Inauguration Day is a watershed moment in the history of America and a remarkable event in the history of nations, and thus a cause for all of us who love this country, conservative and liberal, Democrat and Republican, to celebrate.

Second, in order to do this as conservative – as conservatives who have been through the culture wars -- we need to get past the mixed feelings we will inevitably have as the nation marks its progress in moving away from the racial divisions and divisiveness of the past. These feelings come not from resistance to the change, but from the knowledge that this celebration should have taken place decades ago and that its delay was not least because our opponents saw political advantage in playing the race card against us and making us its slandered targets.

If we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic congress of the Carter years, which rejected it. If Americans now have accepted an African American to lead their country in war and peace that is in part because an hysterically maligned Republican made two African Americans his secretaries of state. And if, after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, race has continued to be a divisive factor in our politics over the last forty years that is because the generation of Sharpton and Jackson and their liberal supporters have made it so. What conservatives need to recognize in getting past these feelings (and therefore to celebrate) is that because of this political reality it is only they themselves who could end it.

Third, as conservatives who embrace the institutions our founders created we need to separate the two roles of the presidency -- symbolic and political. Today the symbolic role takes precedence and we need to appreciate the specific aspects of that symbolism in the new presidency of Barack Obama, and put aside our anticipations of the policies he may later put in place. There will be time enough for that.

The Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln memorial was given the theme "We Are One," which continued the unity theme of Obama's presidential campaign. This theme has a special resonance for this moment in our history when we are more divided as a nation than at any time since the Civil War. In his victory speech on November 4th, Obama said that his victory was "the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled -- Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America!"

Rich and poor, black and white, we are one -- the Inauguration Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial was designed to dramatize this idea. In his own speech at Celebration the president-elect paid specific tribute to Lincoln for saving the union, and to Martin Luther King for dreaming of a nation united beyond race. There were more black faces on the stage of this celebration and more black faces in the hundreds of thousands who attended it than at any time for any inauguration-related event in the nation's history. This was already a testament to Obama's success in advancing his vision.

Barack Obama is the head of a party whose leaders have accused the outgoing president and his Republican Party of betraying their own country by waging an illegal, aggressive and unnecessary war and in the process destroying its Constitution and the liberties it guarantees. By contrast, in his victory speech in November, Barack Obama repeated his pledge to be president of all Americans, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and thanked the American troops whom a Republican president had sent to Afghanistan and Iraq in these words: “Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.”

In the speech announcing his economic stimulus package Obama deliberately passed up the golden opportunity it presented to blame the biggest financial disaster in the nation's history on Republicans, as Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders would inevitably have done. Continued...