Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th president of the United States: A recap from Washington, DC

The Capitol from the National Mall the morning of Barack
Obama's historic inauguration as the 44th president of
the United States. (Photo: Zach Everson)

My road trip from Louisville to Las Vegas and then Washington, DC, reached its pinnacle this week when I attended the We Are One Concert and the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

We Are One Concert

The We Are One Concert, held Jan. 25, 2009, at the Lincoln Memorial (and available to watch online for free at HBO's website) was the 39th time I've seen Bruce Springsteen perform, but the first time I did so for free.

But while Springsteen's version of The Rising was fantastic (as expected), one of my two highlights was seeing Barack Obama and Pete Seeger in person, both for the first time. With Obama assuming the presidency in two days and Seeger being 89 years old and not touring regularly, I doubted I'd ever get to see either of them.

Typically I'm not a fan of large gatherings. I find dealing with thousands (or in this case hundreds of thousands) people rarely worth it. And when I do attend a huge public event, it's a singular experience for me: I focus on the performance and filter out the crowd.

But at the We Are One Concert the audience was the other highlight. As The Economist's Democracy Now blog described,

"Black people jumped and sang along to Garth Books's cover of the Isley Brothers' classic "Shout," and whites screamed and cheered when they spotted Herbie Hancock playing keyboards for Will.i.am."

And while this white person prefers Herbie Hancock to Garth Brooks, it was amazing nevertheless to see people of all backgrounds caught up in good music.

Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th president of the United States

I reached the National Mall at 7:30 a.m. (apparently later arrivals faced obstacles getting there; my only barrier was trying to walk and juggle a cappuccino, water, and a croissant while keeping my hands warm). I easily found an open spot near the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and, more importantly, a video monitor. While the Capitol was in view, I couldn't make out anything on the stage (with the possible exception of Aretha Franklin's hat).

Shortly after I arrived the monitors re-aired the We Are One concert, giving me a much better view of the show than what I had standing behind 20 people and two trees on Sunday. And still, two days later, people of different backgrounds were tapping their feet and swaying to music that they probably wouldn't otherwise listen to (either that or they were just dancing to get their blood moving in the sub-freezing weather).

As with the concert, the highlight of the inauguration was the other people. The closest event I can compare it to is being in Boston after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. All of those people, cold and cramped, can cause a lot of tension. But Tuesday on the Mall, there was none of it. Strangers were chatting, laughing, and smiling.

There's not much point in recapping the proceedings---if you wanted to see the inauguration, you already have. But here are a few observations probably unique to those of us in attendance:

• President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were booed almost every time they appeared on the monitor (other then when Obama was speaking), but not as loudly as I'd anticipated.
• Cell phone coverage on my iPhone was non existent from about 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., which was when I received a dozen inauguration-relationed text message alerts from a few services I had subscribed to. A local news station had said that extra towers were added to the Mall to accommodate the masses, but that cell providers were asking people to ration their sending of photos. Clearly it didn't work.
• After the inauguration, street closings made it take me more than an hour to find a way off of the Mall, making me feel like a barnyard animal in a pen (albeit it a happy barnyard animal). Once I did make it off the Mall, I couldn't move faster than a shuffle (albeit a happy shuffle) for about another hour.
• Back at my friend's apartment at 3: 30 p.m. (having left there at 6 a.m.) I crashed face down on his couch, doing little more than drooling on his throw pillow for three hours.