Even presidents characterized by reserve can recover their voices at their inauguration. Calvin Coolidge was known as "Silent Cal," stoic and grave. Once, when a dinner companion said she had made a bet that she could make him say more than two words, he replied: "You lose." But he rose to the inaugural occasion in a speech of 4,078 words.

Such numbers nevertheless pale in length to the longest speech (so far), given by William Henry Harrison, the hapless and hatless president who succumbed to pneumonia after delivering, bareheaded in a snowstorm, an inaugural address lasting nearly two hours. He gave the longest speech but served the shortest term as president. He died 31 days later.

The best inaugural addresses are inspirational, appealing to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." They speak to our commonality, to what we cherish in our government, the triumphant reminders of who we are and how far we have come. "The American sound," Ronald Reagan called it. "It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent and fair." Like Walt Whitman, the Gipper heard America singing.

But these are not upbeat times. Today, the music is muted if not discordant, as we confront our economic woes. We're in a recession, not a Depression, but the recollection of the soothing voice of Franklin Roosevelt reminds us that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The radio on that chilly March day in 1933 -- the inauguration was moved forward to January in 1937 -- resonated with the power of reassuring warmth only later recognized as illusionary. He prescribed discipline and direction to tackle the problems facing the nation. Alas, it finally took a war to do that.

Barack Obama has hard work ahead. He has earned his reputation as a wordsmith, and he's immodest in his aspirations to make Lincoln his model. He would have to do better than anyone else to approach Lincoln's poetic call for unity even before the Civil War, evoking "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land."

On Tuesday, we'll all be paying close attention to the new president. It's a day you might say we're all Obamaniacs. We'll be all ears.