When an inaugural address is a continuation

For 56 years, I've been a fan of inaugural addresses. I've watched most of them in those decades since I watched John F. Kennedy's on a small, black-and-white TV in a school auditorium. A few were excellent. Most were laudable, and many were inspiring.

I was not able to watch Donald Trump's inaugural address "live." I was in the car, traveling, but my NPR station carried the address and the ceremony leading up to it live, and I listened intently.

My reaction was immediate: This is not an inaugural address. It's a campaign speech. The new president made no attempt to extol American values or to inspire the citizenry. He spent his brief, 16-minute speech (bonus points for brevity) attacking U.S. policies, foreign countries, and societal trends and promising, with anger and vehemence, to make everything wonderful ... somehow. With all his promises, he never explained exactly how he would get those lost jobs back, how he would counter China's global strategy, or how he would fix the infrastructure, crimes and middle-class malaise in our own country.

He did something else no president I've heard ever tried before: He attacked the United States of America. His term "American carnage" was the most shocking of his address. "Carnage"? The word, with its roots in the word for bloody meat, suggests a scene of scores of dead bodies lying in the street following an artillery bombardment or air strike. The United States has some serious problems, but "carnage" is not a word most people would use to describe this nation. Certainly, there have been incidents, such as Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, or 9/11, that warrant such a description, but the new president was referring to a national carnage — something on par with the Holocaust. Trump's use of the term is chilling and scary. Can he possibly believe "American carnage" is an apt description?

I was especially disappointed in the inaugural address because I had heard a Trump adviser say just hours before that Trump knew the difference between campaigning and governing, and he would begin governing as soon as he was sworn in. That didn't happen, and it's scary.

Campaigning is not the same as governing

It has been said before — American elections put the emphasis on campaigning skills and not on governing skills. We tend to elect the best campaigners, not the best managers or administrators or legislators.

Barack Obama is making himself a classic example of this flaw in the system. Obama presided over an exceptional 2008 presidential campaign, and he won again in 2012, despite having a lot of odds stacked against him. But his legislative or governing achievements are slim, with the exception of the Affordable Care Act, which seems to be slipping deeper and deeper into trouble.

Obama's instinct for addressing every governmental problem is to hit the campaign trail. He is doing it now to try to beat down the complaints about the problems with the launch of health care exchanges. After the tragic mass shooting in Connecticut a year ago, Obama pushed strengthening gun laws by, once again, hitting the campaign trail. A former neighborhood organizer, Obama seems to see every problem as a call for grassroots organizing and marshaling public opinion against or in favor of a particular issue.

I've said it before, that Obama should read Robert Caro's fourth volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, "The Passage of Power." LBJ was the consummate legislator, able to wheel and deal on the Senate floor and willing to manipulate people and issues to achieve his legislative goals. Johnson had his repellent qualities, but he got things done. He got legislation passed — the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare, etc. — when more skilled campaigners (the adored John F. Kennedy) could not.

President Obama could take a lesson from LBJ, who was vice president when Obama was born, and concentrate on the 100 voters in the Senate and the 435 voters in the House instead of appealing to the millions of voters in 50 states to pass legislation.

Continuous campaigning is not governing

Campaigning and governing are not the same thing. You can be good at one and bad at another. What doesn't work is campaigning 365 days of the year, and that's what Congress and the White House are doing.

President Obama has shown his skills as a campaigner. He has won two national elections against heavy odds both times — the first time because the primary road was hazardous and the second because he faced a conservative backlash against his policies.

Now look at him: He faces three significant challenges involving the deaths of American diplomats in Libya (and the apparent administration attempt to minimize the nature of the attack against the U.S. outpost), the IRS targeting of conservative political groups for special scrutiny, and his Justice Department's taking of Associated Press phone records. The president has remained in the campaign mode throughout these problems, pushing his programs to voters while ignoring the voters who really matter — the ones inside the big building on Capitol Hill.

Congress has also been guilty of choosing campaigning over governing. It has been reported that the orientation of freshman members of Congress includes a weekly quota for raising money. And Sen. Mitch McConnell let slip the truth three years ago when he said Republicans' top legislative agenda was to prevent Obama from winning a second term.

Until the leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue decide to govern together instead of campaign continuously against each other, little or nothing will be accomplished.