Illustration by Tom Bachtell

After Barack Obama had been sworn in for the final time for his final term—and after he had delivered his final Inaugural Address, and after he had turned to leave the podium atop the Capitol steps (though not before turning back to gaze at the multitude on the Mall, murmuring, “I want to take a look one more time, I’m not going to see this again”), and after he and Michelle had walked down Pennsylvania Avenue—the Obamas repaired to a glassed-in reviewing stand in front of the White House. They seemed as relaxed as if they were upstairs in the family quarters, watching the marching bands on TV like the rest of us. The First Couple smooched for Sasha’s iPhone camera. Malia stuck her head in front of her sister’s lens and made a face. And the President popped something into his mouth.

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews posed a question to his panel: “O.K., ladies and gentlemen, what’s he chewing?”

“Nicorette,” said Joy Reid, the managing editor of TheGrio.com.

“Nicorette,” said Michael Steele, the former Republican National Chairman.

“We all vote for Nicorette,” said Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post columnist.

“And he’s doing it openly,” Reid added. “He’s not even hiding it!”

It was as if Obama, having become the first Democratic President since F.D.R. to be granted a second term by a popular majority, had decided, what the hell, he might as well risk letting Obama be Obama. He has never really been anybody but, of course. His famous temperament—cool, analytic, self-confidently averse to self-pity and self-dramatization—has been a constant since childhood. His usually sympathetic, sometimes overgenerous interpretation of others’ motives has been a hallmark of his character at least since his student days. His impulse to bridge gaps—to harmonize political, cultural, and racial differences, much as he harmonized the disparities embedded in his own mélange of identities—was indispensable to his political ascent. But so was the consistency of his social vision, which has scarcely changed since his student days. And so was the strength of his ambition to advance that vision and to overcome the obstacles in its (and his) path—if necessary, by audacious struggle. By fighting for it.

Still, as the Obama of the second term emerges, everyone senses a difference from the Obama of the first. It’s not that there’s a New Obama, à la the many New Nixons of old. But the harmonizing, conciliatory side of the President’s political and personal character has been eclipsed, for the moment at least, by the side of him that is at once more insistent and more visionary. That side was on display, somewhat tentatively, in the year-end showdown over allowing taxes to rise on the highest incomes. It was manifest in his defiance of the latest Republican attempt to blackmail him by threatening to force the government into default. And it found robust expression in an Inaugural Address that added up to a quietly passionate brief for both the necessity and the Americanness of an energetic public sphere—a manifesto for what the President dared to call, with a touch of sly provocation, “collective action.”

This address was in every way superior to the one he had delivered from the same spot four years earlier. That one, coming amid a terrifying financial crisis that the speaker described in surprisingly mild terms (“our economy is badly weakened”), had been a surprisingly pedestrian call for unity, for abandoning “stale political arguments” and “worn-out dogmas.” This one was a political argument—a political argument that advocated, if not a dogma (outside of the Vatican, nobody likes dogmas), a political creed.

In front of the Capitol last Monday, Obama did not specify that creed. But the Tuesday papers did. OBAMA OFFERS LIBERAL VISION: ‘WE MUST ACT’ (the New York Times). A LIBERAL VISION (the Hartford Courant). FOR HIS SECOND TERM, A SWEEPING LIBERAL VISION (the Los Angeles Times). That mainstream newspaper editors felt free to trumpet what is still sometimes called “the ‘L’ word” in such a charged context, and with no discernible fear of giving offense, suggests that the Arctic isn’t the only place where the ice is melting.

The modern crisis of liberalism began in the nineteen-sixties with the disintegration of New Frontier/Great Society euphoria in the quagmire of Vietnam, continued through the riotous turmoils of the late sixties and seventies, and crested with the Reagan ascendancy of the eighties. Liberal politicians, especially those with Presidential ambitions, assumed a long-lasting defensive crouch. A quadrennial feature of the past half century has been the spectacle of some liberal grandee indignantly denying that he is anything of the kind. In 1988, when George Bush the Elder referred to the “liberalism” of his opponent, Michael Dukakis, the Dukakis campaign accused him of “mudslinging.” In 2004, John Kerry, asked if he was a liberal, remarked, “I think it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.” So comprehensively was “liberalism” anathematized by a combination of liberal timidity and conservative demonizing that it became the political orientation that dared not speak its name. “Pragmatist,” “progressive”—these were acceptable, though even the latter was deployed cautiously. A common liberal dodge was to dismiss “labels” per se. Conservatives, by contrast, have evinced no such reluctance about their appellation. They say it loud and they say it proud.

The long liberal retreat wasn’t just terminological. It was also, more consequentially, ideological. Obama was reëlected by a coalition: an alliance of disparate groups (Latinos and African-Americans, women and young people, the highly educated and the poor, urban professionals and the struggling middle class, socially-conscious religious believers and the unchurched) and issue concerns (income inequality and jobs, education and climate change, gay rights and immigration, reproductive freedom and health security). His Inaugural Address can be seen as an attempt to meld these groups and concerns into a conceptual whole, a coherent political and ethical world view. Obama wants to turn a coalition into a movement, and he’ll need one to have any chance of wresting even minimal gains from a sclerotic Congress in thrall to a reactionary minority. Republicans control the malapportioned House. And, last Thursday, Republicans and a handful of Democratic old bulls (and cows) succeeded in thwarting meaningful filibuster reform.

The President used to see himself as above the fray. Now he knows he’s in the thick of it. Four years ago, he let his online volunteer network wither. This time, he’s keeping it humming as Organizing for Action, designed to mobilize popular pressure on lawmakers. Still, for myriad reasons, his goals and prospects are much more modest than those of his great liberal predecessors. But while B.H.O.’s political Nicorette may not yield the full, rich tobacco flavor of F.D.R.’s Camels, L.B.J.’s Lucky Strikes, or J.F.K.’s Cuban cigars, the active ingredient is the same. ♦