Citizens

Linda Hirshmann has a very interesting take on Obama's speech, starting with his address to "My fellow citizens":

There are two kinds of participants in the American Republic: citizens and Americans. They parallel precisely Isaiah Berlin's powerful, defining essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." Citizens achieve positive liberty, freedom to. Americans enjoy negative liberty, freedom from. Almost nothing Barack Obama says is accidental. He chose "citizens," not "Americans."
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Now Barack Obama, no dummy, is offering not just political change, but metaphysical change. Like few others in the liberal revival, he has learned the lesson that if you're going to change the politics, you must change people's understandings of what it means to be human, to make them let go of the possessive individualism that has led to such disaster. We caught a glimpse of this in his debate with Joe the Plumber, in which he gently tried to lead Joe to see himself as related to someone, even if it was only Joe's younger, poorer self. In invoking the concept of citizenship, he has at his side a strand of American history often overlooked in the last, conservative years: that, as the prize-winning American historian Gordon Wood the American Republic was founded in classical virtue, most particularly the virtue and the service ethic of the Father, George Washington.