I've never seen such a crowd in the student union building today as I did an hour before Barack Obama's inauguration. The euphoria is over; let the work begin.

Glenn Greenwald:

I can understand someone being moved by the events of today, even though pageantry, ceremony and ritual of this sort doesn't move me personally (if anything, political spectacles of this magnitude, that are engineered with such massive and adept stagecraft, make me slightly uncomfortable, but I can definitely see how other reasonable people would find it uplifting).

Whatever one's views are on what came before the Bush/Cheney darkness and whatever one's guesses are about what is likely to come now, it's simply the case that seeing that duo and all of their rotted appendages disappear is a positive event. Add to that the fact that the election of an African-American as President is something many (most) people thought they'd never see, and add on to that the throngs of millions of very engaged citizens who are genuinely convinced (rightly or wrongly) that something momentous and important is now going to happen, and it's understandable that even people generally inured to these sorts of highly engineered events are swept up with the sentiments of the day.