Will Obama's Inaugural Address Be One for the Ages?

Alex Brandon / AP

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Millions of people, hundreds of parties, tens of millions of dollars in security, and in 10 years' time, if President-elect Barack Obama is lucky, all that most people will likely recall from his Inauguration is one sentence. "I was there when Obama said ..." they'll tell their friends. The parade, the cold, the crowds and the traffic will all dim next to the bright memory of how it felt to witness and listen to that historic address. (See the civil rights movement and the Obama presidency.)

Obama and his speechwriters know this all too well, and they have surely spent the past several weeks pondering what that memorable line might be, and whether the speech can still be great without one. "Given both his rhetorical skills and his historic victory, expectations are unrealistically high for him," says Thomas Alan Schwartz, a presidential historian at Vanderbilt University. "His speechwriters are probably trying to find just the right phrase that is memorable. But I am sure it is not easy."

With the high stakes and historic occasion, it's no wonder that Obama has spent more time on this speech than virtually any other since the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that propelled him into the spotlight. He took nearly four months to write that speech in stolen minutes on the Senate campaign trail and in late-night sessions. By comparison, he penned his 2008 convention speech in just over a week and his Philadelphia speech on race in just two nights.

This time around Obama began discussions with speechwriter Jon Favreau and adviser David Axelrod the week before Thanksgiving. Favreau, a 27-year-old boy wonder, delivered the first and second drafts of the speech to Obama in December. Obama did extensive editing and writing of his own last weekend, and the text has been edited and discussed by all three men since. A running draft pings around cyberspace as Favreau, Axelrod and Obama bounce ideas off one another daily — yet another reason Obama wants to keep his BlackBerry. Obama tends to do his best writing alone, late at night when Michelle and the girls have gone to bed. "The speech will describe the moment we're in and the spirit required to emerge from this crisis even stronger and more united than before," said Nick Shapiro, an Obama spokesman.

And it will apparently do so succinctly. It is said to be relatively short, just over 20 minutes long — a mere bulletin compared with the longest Inaugural speech, by William Henry Harrison. That speech, in 1841, clocked in at over two hours. (Harrison died a month later of the cold he was said to have contracted on his Inaugural day.) The shortest: George Washington's speech, at a loquacious 135 words. (See the 10 greatest speeches of all time.)

The President-elect is said to be taking inspiration from John F. Kennedy's Inaugural speech and Abraham Lincoln's second such speech, notable for their focus on shared sacrifice at transformational moments in U.S. history. Obama's incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, described the central theme as "an era of responsibility" during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday. "For too long there's been a culture of everything goes," Emanuel added. "We need that culture of American responsibility, not just to be asked of the American people but of its leaders."

For all the focus on coming up with one notable turn of phrase, it can be counter-productive to spend too much time trying to condense the country's problems into a sentence. "I do understand the pressure to come up with the nugget, but it's a pressure that should be resisted," says Richard Norton Smith, a presidential historian at George Mason University. "We don't vote for the speechwriters." On the other hand, Obama is one of those rare Presidents, along with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, who writes large portions of his own speeches.

In putting the finishing touches on his remarks, Obama might want to take note of where some other famous catchphrases came from. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" came from his boarding school motto, "Ask not what your school can do for you — ask what you can do for your school." Franklin Delano Roosevelt's top aide and alter ego, Louis Howe, said he found the famous phrase "You have nothing to fear but fear itself" in a New York newspaper he'd seen weeks before the Inauguration.

Obama's historic victory as the country's first African-American President, the grass-roots nature of his campaign and his gift for rhetoric have helped drum up expectations to unparalleled levels. "People look to these speeches as a moment of renewal, hope, expectations for better days ahead," says Robert Dallek, another presidential historian. "Obama himself is so masterful at this kind of thing ... there is enormous pressure to capture the public's imagination — not just a nice turn of phrase or slogan — because it becomes something larger than themselves."

And never more so than at the end of the first presidential swearing in. It was then that a mildly shell-shocked George Washington first uttered the most enduring Inaugural phrase of all. After being sworn in, he spontaneously added, "So help me God." Every President since has done the same.

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See pictures of Obama's Inaugural train ride to Washington.