We start with a speech by Trevor Phillips, who is paying homage to Obama only weeks after he slammed Obama in Prospect magazine! Anyway, it’s a day of celebration so I won’t get too bitchy. Harriet Harman was on a bit earlier and was short and sweet.
I have my Obama t-shirt on, woohoo!

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Its all just about to kick off, the old presidents, Clinton, Bush, Carter have all arrived.

One of the first jobs of an American president is to redecorate the Oval Office. Each new president is expected to update the furniture, replace the carpet, repaint the walls and woodwork as well as add some new paintings. There are also the sculptures, usually three or four. So when he moves in today, President Barack Obama will have to decide what to do with a bronze bust of Winston Churchill.

The bust is on loan from the British government and was installed by his predecessor, President George W Bush in 2001. Bush explains it in an official White House tour video [my transcript]: "my friend the prime minister of Great Britain heard me say that I greatly admired Winston Churchill and so he saw to it that the government loaned me this and I am most honored to have this Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill. I like Churchill because he was a great war leader. He was resolute, he was tough, he knew what he believed, and he had a fabulous sense of humor. And in this job, believe me, you've gotta have a sense of humor. Otherwise it makes for the days awfully long and for the nights awfully short." (Predictably, the video inspired a spoof.)

Officially, Her Majesty's government loaned the bust to Bush for the duration of his term. At the end of this month, the bust can therefore go back to the Government Art Collection on Cockspur Street. But there is little to prevent Obama from retaining the sculpture, just like there was little that prevented him from retaining Bush's Defense Secretary and several other "holdover" officials.

Downing Street, always ready to cultivate Britain's "special relationship" with America, would probably happily extend the loan to another four to eight years. After all, no figure in the world better symbolizes the "special relationship" than Churchill. In his last Lord Mayor's Banquet Speech, Prime Minister Gordon Brown explained it yet again: "Winston Churchill described the joint inheritance of Britain and America as not just a shared history but a shared belief in the great principles of freedom, and the rights of man - of what Barack Obama described in his election night speech as the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope."

Will Obama keep his Churchill? Obama's speech writers would certainly appreciate it. In the United States, the signifier "Churchill" is as positively evaluated as "Obama" in the United Kingdom right now. As Christopher Hitchens observes, in America, Churchill "occupies an unrivaled place in the common stock of reference, ranging from the mock-heroic to the downright kitsch." The man voted the Greatest Briton in a 2002, argues Hitchens, "can be quoted even more safely than Lincoln in that he was never a member of any American faction."

Good politics is not the only reason for Obama to retain the bust. Last year, the New England Historic Genealogical Society discovered that Obama is in fact related to Churchill. (The researchers also found that Obama is a ninth cousin of Brad Pitt and a distant relative to five former U.S. presidents, including George W Bush.) So why not keep a bust of a distant family member which happens to be a great war leader that most Americans love?

As it is often the case, family history cuts both ways. In Kenya, the land of Obama's father, the signifier "Churchill" carries nothing but negative connotations. Several times in his long political career, Churchill was responsible for Britain's empire, which until 1963 included Kenya. It was his government which in 1952 declared the so-called Kenya Emergency - an attempt to quash a rebellion against colonial rule known as Mau Mau. For the next eight years, suspected rebels were routinely detained, tortured, hanged and shot. According to Caroline Elkins, the colonial soldiers killed between fifteen and twenty thousand Kenyans in combat, while up to one hundred thousand perished in the detention camps. One of those who endured torture in a British prison was Hussein Onyango Obama, US president's Kenyan grandfather. Traces of this story can be found in Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father as well as in a few interviews; much more is sure to come. For now, it behooves us to remember it when Obama sends his Churchill packing. The time for the Anglo-American "special relationship" to move beyond Churchill is long overdue.

Srdjan Vucetic is Dillard Fellow in International Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge 

A friend had emailed me overnight to ask “So, what’s the atmosphere like over there?”

My immediate reaction was: “Erm, well, I don’t really know. Because I haven’t been out in the thick of things yet”.

I arrived at K’s house yesterday and we spent the afternoon/evening chatting, sleeping, eating and watching live footage of Obama and Biden’s journey from Philadelphia to DC. See, sometimes it’s just enough to be in the right country because you actually get to see things like that as they happen .

But actually, I realise that it’s not just that my yesterday was low-key. Based on my journey through the city at lunchtime (from Dulles Airport to the NE area, zip code 20002 if you want to look it up) and also on the news reports I’m seeing - where poor freezing newsreaders are standing on the Mall, with the Capitol building behind them - I can say that the atmosphere in DC yesterday was, surprisingly, also very muted.

Said newsreaders are standing on a fairly empty Mall; and as our airport shuttle bus made its way through the city yesterday, the streets were really very quiet. Mind you, that always freaks me out about American cities (bar New York): where are all the pedestrians? (In this case: inside, probably, as it’s sub-zero temperatures.)

All this will undoubtedly change today, however - as a) I will be entering the thick of it, to b) go to the massive concert being held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It kicks off at 1.30pm our time (for the duration of my stay over here, “our time” will be Washington time ) and they’re expecting a crowd of 500,000.

You can watch the concert live on www.hbo.com. I’m presuming that means you can watch it live on the site internationally, also. If so, it kicks off at 6.30pm UK time.

Watch out for me. I’ll be the one in a coat, hat and scarf.

And here was Barack’s full speech in Baltimore:

As the reporter and my friend K both noted, it’s almost as if Obama is still campaigning. And as I replied, it strikes me that this because he truly wants a sea-change in the country. He genuinely wants Americans to reach out and help each other more, to look after each other and work together; to change the mood of a nation beyond doing so with intangible feelings like hope and optimism. As Obama said on the night of November 4th, his election is just the beginning. And as a result he will, perhaps, have to keep drilling his vision - or rather: the practical application of his vision - into the American people. I doubt he will ever let up. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

*Update* Just found footage from Delaware, including Joe’s full introductory speech. Gotta love around 5 minutes, where all the white secret service agents appear, followed by their black President. Magical :

slideshowHey, America, I’m back! And I’m pleased to be here.” That’s what I wanted to shout when I arrived at Cincinnati airport on Thursday afternoon. Even the blast of icy air that hit me on disembarking the plane wasn’t going to dim my spirits and stop this next chapter in my Obama journey.

The officials at the airport had other ideas though. First was the frustration of having to fill out a paper immigration form, despite having filled out the exact same thing online before I left London. The new system just introduced is not yet fully in operation, at least not in Cincinnati. But that was minor compared to the succession of checks, questions, x-rays, searches and queues that I and my bags were then subjected to. And not all of them were conducted in an entirely friendly manner. I picked my suitcase up from the carousel only for it to be x-rayed, searched and then deposited on a conveyer belt to be transported to a different part of the airport for me to pick up all over again. The lack of signage only added to my confusion.

So it was with great relief that I saw the friendly faces of Randy and Jodi waiting for me. Last time I had seen them was on the evening before election day, hope mixed with nervous tension and the adrenaline of gearing up for one final big get-out-the-vote push.

Then the weather had been unseasonably warm. Now it was unusually cold. -12C when I landed and quickly plunging to -19C as night fell. I’ve never experienced a cold like that; which penetrates clothing within seconds. It was so cold that schools across the area were closed on Friday. On the flip side I was introduced to the great American tradition of making ’snow angels’ in the yard.

I was interviewed by CBS’s London bureau (ooh, don’t you just love that? “London bureau”) last week, over a coffee in Soho. It was apparently for their Sunday morning show called, erm, Sunday Morning - and, well, I guess it just never really hit me that that’s a Proper Television Show. You know, like, beamed into people’s homes across America, and everything.

Anyway, turns out that it is - and I was just on it, part of a segment on how people around the world are feeling about Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Apparently.

Because I didn’t see it.

Partly because, as I say, it hadn’t really occurred to me that it would actually be on TV; and partly because I was too excited about the possibility of seeing both Chris Matthews and Meet The Press on a Real Actual Television that K and I have been sitting here watching MSNBC, not CBS, this morning.

Here’s the show’s main page on the CBS website; and here’s a link to this Sunday’s show, where presumably there will be a video of it posted at some point. I and my wonky British teeth will be in the ‘World Is Watching’ segment. *Gulp*.

*Update* Here’s a link to a piece about that segment. I am “Briton Andrea Mann”!

I’ve just had couple of days in Cincinnati not doing politics and hearing only of the splash landing rather than the economic crash landing. But on Saturday things changed. I went to the Freedom Center - the Underground Railroad museum - to learn about this amazing part of the Americian story. The heroism and activism of ordinary people - black and white - who helped slaves escape from the south and provided safe passage for them on their journey to freedom.

I’m off to an African Inaugural ball tonight. Hosted by the African Foundation and a range of Maryland African / Afro-Caribbean academics and journalists. There’s an amazing line up of live African music to look forward to. I am interested in just seeing the people there and hearing what Obama’s inauguration means to them and to the perceptions of their home continent.

If I hadn’t been delayed by those 10 minutes, I wouldn’t have happened to be walking down the street towards the Lincoln Memorial concert just as the Obama motorcade went past.

And if I hadn’t decided to walk down to the Washington Monument after learning that there was no chance of getting into the concert ground itself, I would never have passed this man as he happened to be walking the other way:

This man, for the uninitiated - ie British people - is Chris Matthews. He’s one of America’s best-known TV pundits - and one of my favourites - and bumping into him is akin to following a British general election like a total geek, then flying to London only to bump into Jeremy Paxman or David Dimbleby.

It’s true. In America, anything *is* possible.

“Advisers to President-elect Barack Obama say one of his first duties in office will be to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. That executive order is expected during Obama’s first week on the job - and possibly on his first day, according to two transition team advisers.”

Here was Olbermann’s take on this - and Obama’s ‘looking forward’ policy - last night, with great commentary from constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley:

So here, instead, was Keith Olbermann’s coverage of it (ie the conference in nice, palatable chunks broken up by comment/sarcarsm/fact-correction):

Followed by Richard Wolffe’s input:

Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Bono, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Renee Fleming, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Heather Headley, John Legend, Jennifer Nettles, John Mellencamp, Usher Raymond IV, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, will.i.am, and Stevie Wonder.

<gulp>

*yes, there will be more

Just him, then.