Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is the author of eight books, including a new novel, "Patriots," and a post-election e-book, "Why Romney Lost." Frum was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. 
  
 (CNN) -- The inaugural addresses of the presidents are, for the most part, a wasteland of howling rhetoric and dried-out inspiration. 
  
 History has little noted, nor has it long remembered, more than a handful of them. Lincoln's two inaugural addresses stand (of course) as the great exception. Franklin Roosevelt's addresses in 1933 and 1937 remain alive, as does the sonorous rhetoric of John F. Kennedy's address in 1961. We continue to quote a single sentence from Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural, a sentence from Ronald Reagan's first and a two-word phrase from Lyndon Johnson's. After that ... 
  
 After that, you get a lot of this: 
  
 "Liberty -- liberty within the law -- and civilization are inseparable, and though both were threatened, we find them now secure; and there comes to Americans the profound assurance that our representative government is the highest expression and surest guaranty of both." 
  
 Who said that? It could have been any one of 20 presidents. (In this case, the speaker happens to be Warren G. Harding.) 
  
 Writing a great inaugural speech must be very hard, since even many strong and important presidents failed to do it. 
  
 Theodore Roosevelt failed. Dwight Eisenhower failed. Barack Obama failed the first time, and since second inaugural addresses are almost always even worse than firsts, it seems almost certain he'll fail again on Monday. 
  
 Why do inaugural addresses fail? 
  
 They fail for two reasons: One subject to the speaker's control; the other, not. 
  
 They fail, first, because the grandeur of the occasion inspires new presidents and their teams to overblown rhetoric, even as their political advisers steer them away from too specific commitments. Grand language wrapped around a thin message produces only vapid blather. 
  
 Consider, for example, this passage from Obama's first inaugural address: 
  
 "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history ...." 
  
 Unfortunately for Obama, those words were false as description and therefore inaccurate as prediction. You might say that the line "we come to proclaim an end to ... false promises" was itself a false promise. Good writing can never come from bad thinking. 
  
 Zelizer: Learning from Lincoln, Wilson, FDR 
  
 But there's another source of failure, one not so easily corrected. Inaugural addresses can fail even when the ideas are clear, even when the writing is fine, if the addresses make commitments that the ensuing presidency cannot deliver. 
  
 Listen to this inspiring passage: 
  
 "The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. 
  
 "It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness. It has given new inspiration to the power of self-help in both races by making labor more honorable to the one and more necessary to the other. The influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years." 
  
 "No doubt this great change has caused serious disturbance to our Southern communities. This is to be deplored, though it was perhaps unavoidable. But those who resisted the change should remember that under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship." 
  
 Those were the words of James A. Garfield. Between Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, no president expressed a stronger personal commitment to equal rights for black Americans than Garfield in 1881. Yet this commitment is remembered today only by historians. 
  
 Garfield was assassinated in September 1881, serving barely six months in office. Even had Garfield served a full term, his efforts would almost certainly have failed. 
  
 Federal enforcement of the voting rights of Southern blacks; federal funding of equal education for black children -- to become reality, these aspirations of Garfield's required support from courts, Congress and public opinion. None would have been forthcoming. 
  
 Garfield's aspirations were doomed to fail by forces of opposition too strong for him to overcome. Garfield's noble summons went unheeded at the time and therefore inspires little interest now. 
  
 An inaugural address is a plan for what is to come. Even a good president can deliver a bad speech. In fact, they usually do. But however beautifully written, a speech can only be made great by the presidency that follows. An inaugural address is a plan, and the test of a plan is the result. 
  
 A speech can fail all by itself. Its ideas can be weak, its language can be foggy. But even if the ideas are clear and the words crisp, an inaugural address can be deemed "great" only if it is followed by actions that make good on its lofty words. This is why we still remember the mighty words of Lincoln and FDR and why we forget almost all the others. 
  
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 The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum. ||||| Barack Obama starts his second term Monday. Or Sunday, technically. That in itself makes this a good week. And while I know I should be thinking about higher-plane issues like the great arcs of history and liberalism and whether Gunnar Myrdal or William Julius Wilson had it right all along, as I watch him take the oath (which I trust John Roberts has been practicing this time), I’m going to be thinking chiefly about two things. First, all my hundreds of right-wing commenters over the years who assured me (in increasingly hysterical and sadistic language) that he’d never be nominated, then that he could never win, then that he would never succeed, then that he’d certainly never be reelected, etc. Don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath waiting for your mea culpae. And second, I’m very curious to see what kind of tone he seeks to establish in his address. I hope it’s combative, and I hope he has some language in there that’s new and startling and tells this town that the second-term Obama is going to be a much tougher customer than the first. 
  
 President Barack Obama speaks about the debt limit in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Jan. 14, 2013. (Carolyn Kaster/AP) 
  
 I know. Presidents are supposed to rise above that for inaugural addresses. Supposed to be very high-minded. That would be nice. But these are low-minded times, and he’s got some extremely low-minded opposition. Obama spent part of his first term, a lot of his first term, being far more high-minded than they deserve. 
  
 It cost him a lot, and it may have cost the country even more. Early on, in the interest of conciliation, and because he understood what a storm it would kick up on the right, he decided on no torture-related prosecutions. Probably the right thing politically. But the country pays a long-term price for letting all that disgusting business happen in our name with no consequences. On more prosaic skirmishes, Obama let the Republicans define the debate—notably the spring 2011 government shutdown threat and the summer 2011 debt-limit mess. For all he accomplished—and he did accomplish a lot, there’s no denying that—he also let himself get pushed around. 
  
 Well, no more. He needs to send a signal in his address that he means business and that he’s figured out who’s boss. A first-term president with very little Washington and world experience in the middle of the worst economic crisis in 80 years was bound to be a little tentative. But now he’s a second-termer with plenty of experience, knowledge of the sort that only the president has, and a recovering economy (for which he’s bound to get the credit). He’s pretty popular again. The Republicans contrive new ways every day to get less popular. He’s got the upper hand, and he needs to act like it. 
  
 That doesn’t mean an explicitly partisan speech about specific policies. That would be, in addition to inappropriate, crushingly dull. It does mean a speech in which he puts forward an idea about the country that is pointed and that can’t be expressed in the usual inoffensive platitudes. 
  
 George W. Bush did this very well in his second inaugural address, which I actually thought was a terrifically good speech, one of the more memorable inaugural speeches of our time. It was, you might recall, all about democracy promotion being America’s ineluctable post-9/11 destiny. I was not the world’s biggest fan of democracy promotion Bush-Cheney style. But I was impressed by the speech that articulated it, because I had to admit: Bush was speaking with force; he was unapologetically stating a vision and destiny that were specifically derived from his ideology; he was saying to Democrats, but without being explicitly partisan: “This is the program, people. Get with it.” 
  
 Obama needs to send a signal in his address that he means business and that he’s figured out who’s boss. 
  
 Liberals, your correspondent very much included, spent years being repulsed by the Bush swagger. But actually, Obama could use a dollop of it. It’s his town now, and he needs to act like it. He needs to shock people a little, so they get the message. If I were David Axelrod, one of my instructions to the speechwriters would be: Put one thing in there, just one thing, that will really, deeply offend David Gergen. 
  
 Then of course after the speech he needs to govern that way. He’s off to a decent start. He won the fiscal-cliff fight. The Republicans just caved on the debt fight. Okay, it was a semi-cave, but still, they’re no longer standing pat on the Boehner Rule (a dollar in cuts for every dollar in debt-ceiling increase), and that is a major concession. On guns, it’ll be a hard one. But if Organizing for America gets kicked into high gear again, as we’re hearing it will from Robert Gibbs and others, then who knows. The NRA is mighty, but they haven’t even faced a fight in 15 years, so we don’t actually know how strong they are. 
  
 The conventional wisdom today is that compared to four years ago, this inaugural is a big so what. I disagree, and pretty passionately. One feels better about the economy, which was just terrifying four years ago. And more than that, one suspects Obama has learned some valuable things in these past four years about the powers of his office (and its limits), and about the nature of his loony but increasingly self-marginalizing opposition. I guess we’ll start finding out at noon Monday. |||||
Output:
Planning to watch President Obama's speech today? Don't get your hopes up. After all, how many inaugural speeches can we remember from the entirety of American history? Just a handful of lines from a few addresses, writes David Frum at CNN. That's in part because presidents use "overblown rhetoric" to mark the moment—but it's impolitic for them to make concrete pledges. "Grand language wrapped around a thin message produces only vapid blather." Then there's the fact that it's often impossible for them to keep any promises they might make. "However beautifully written, a speech can only be made great by the presidency that follows," Frum notes. So what should Obama say? At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky calls for fighting words. He needs to tell Washington "that the second-term Obama is going to be a much tougher customer than the first." Forget about inaugural high-mindedness: "These are low-minded times, and he’s got some extremely low-minded opposition." Click for Frum's full column, or Tomasky's.