Only Time Will Tell

I did not get to watch much of the event yesterday, but I did get a chance to read Glen ,Fred, Peter, Hugh and to view some of the coverage. The quotes below seem to me to be a good summary of the feelings of the 51% who voted for Bush and the 49% who did not.

Jonah Goldberg of the 51%,

...what President Bush understands now is that America itself is a radical nation, founded on the revolutionary principle that self-government is simultaneously the best form of government and the most moral. And that lovers of liberty in all parties should seek to conserve that legacy. The circumstances we face today are new, but the principles are eternal. So yes, George W. Bush is a revolutionary, but he is merely the latest in a long line of American revolutionaries.

(Late addition Thanks Kirk)

Peggy Noonan also of the 51%,

...The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

and

Andrew Sullivan of the 49%,

...How do you reconcile the expansion of freedom with Bush's expansion of government? How do you square domestic freedom with the curtailment of civil liberties in a war on terror? How do you proclaim that America is a force for freeing dissidents, when the government now has unprecedented powers to detain anyone suspected of terror across the globe and subject them to coercive interrogation techniques that the government will not disclose?

Only time will tell.