Obama: 'The challenges we meet are real'

Updated on 20 January 2009

Barack Obama's first words as president aim far higher than the skies above the crowds that came to see him.

He spoke of hope, of virtue, of a moment that would define a generation.

Obama made a direct appeal to all Americans to take charge of shaping their own destiny: to their hard work and honesty, to a return to responsibility.

Before him was a sea of faces and waving flags cheering the words of the man who has taken just eight years to rise from relative obscurity to become leader of the most powerful nation on earth.

Obama analysis

Elaine Kamarck, a senior official on the Democratic National Committee and a party superdelegate who backed Hillary Clinton, and award-winning novelist and playwright Darryl Pinckney, who's written widely on the politics of black identity in modern America, discuss the inauguration.