Speech take 1

One of the things that I found most striking in Obama's speech was the "small-c" conservatism at its core:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

Note the recognition of immutable values ("old" and "true"), and the credit given to those values as cornerstones of American society. For all the right's complaints about Obama as some kind of mushy-headed cultural relativist out of the ivy tower, the man sticks by the values that motivated Lincoln, TR, FDR and Reagan.