Last Saturday, Barack Obama went on a whistle-stop train tour, starting in Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy. Last Sunday, he kicked off the inaugural with a free concert at the Lincoln Memorial that included U2 and Bruce Springsteen. This Tuesday (Wednesday here), he will be sworn in on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, an inaugural that will feature as well the great Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma among other celebrities.

This is going back to roots, a harking back to America’s libertarian beginnings. It is also advancing musical taste. (I don’t know what George W. Bush’s preferences were, but country could not have been far behind.) No wonder Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo wasn’t invited — on both counts.

It’s a tossup on which is keener, Obama’s sense of drama or his sense of history. His sense of drama is, of course, patent in all the symbolisms he has strewn around over the past few days. Gospel music is full of references to the train that brings salvation, temporal or eternal, earthbound or in the next life, to the oppressed. “You can beat us with wires/ You can beat us with chains/ You can run out your rules/ But you know you can’t outrun the history train,” as Paul Simon sings in his gospel-like song, “Peace Like a River.” The train car Obama specifically rode was built in 1939, a time when the suggestion of a black American president would have sent the Southern lynch mobs into a frenzy of mayhem. Well, the history train has arrived at the capital. Change has come to America.

The sense of history is even more patent. It’s not an exaggerated sense of self-importance that has driven Obama to invite Abraham Lincoln into the inauguration: Lincoln might as well be seated there. I don’t see how Obama can ever exaggerate his importance. He is the culmination of a dream that began long ago, when Lincoln intoned that four score and seven years before his time, his forefathers brought forth upon his continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Until last year that dream was just a dream, and quite an impossible one. For close to two centuries and a half after the end of the US Civil War, some remained more equal than others in the nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. To this very day, if in ways that are less murderous. Obama can never sufficiently belabor his importance, personally or symbolically. He is the fulfillment of Lincoln’s dream. It is only fitting that he should hark back to his roots, swearing to abide by his presidential duties on the Bible of the fellow who started out reading by candlelight in a log cabin and ended up setting a nation free.

I understand that Obama means to deliver a speech not unlike the Gettysburg Address. I do not envy him or his speechwriters the task.

Observers of course are observing that Obama faces a “perfect storm” of crises when he steps into the Oval Office, which is bound to swirl around him after the cheering and exulting and reveling are done. And it is all he’ll be able to do to face up to the challenge. Fair warning, but I don’t know that the new president is unaware of, or unprepared for, it. He’s not Dubya, or, well, Erap.

I remember during the campaign that Jon Stewart asked him half-jestingly if he wasn’t now telling himself, as the debris of Wall Street and a collapsing economy fell on him, that this wasn’t what he signed for. Obama answered gamely: Not at all, this was the very time anyone dreaming of the presidency could possibly want to have: a time in the life of the nation when a president stood to do something truly, well, historic. You live for times like this, he said, not unlike Kobe Bryant saying he lived for the game-making — or -breaking — shots.

But it’s not just his psychological preparedness that gives you a sense of his potency. The preparations for his inauguration already show he has begun to address the challenge of his time.

He has done so by giving Americans to see where they began, thereby giving them to see where they are going. Or he has done so by leading America back to its roots, thereby leading America forward to its future. Specifically, he has done so by starting the history train from Washington and Lincoln, the founding fathers, the source of the strength of the land of the free and the brave. That strength does not lie in paranoia and Homeland Security. That strength does lies in freedom and democracy. That strength does not lie in people like Dubya, Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, Randolph Hearst, the Imperialists, the assassins who murdered Lincoln and Martin Luther King. It lies in people like Martin Luther King, Franklin Roosevelt, Mark Twain, the Anti-Imperialists, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington.

Democracy is not a weak system, it is the most powerful one. More powerful than autocracy, more powerful than dictatorship, more powerful than fascism. That is so because it does not make the state powerful, it does not make the government powerful, it does not make a few people, enlightened or tyrannical as they may be, powerful. It makes the people powerful. Only the people have the power to decide their own fate. Only the people have the power to solve their own problems.

A nation is only as strong as its people are. Lincoln himself faced the perfect storm in the form of a divided nation and weathered it, or allowed his nation to (he himself perished in its wake) by calling forth the democratic ideal. Roosevelt himself faced the perfect storm in the form of the Great Depression and weathered it, or allowed his nation to (fortunately, he lived long enough despite disease to see it recover) by living forth the democratic ideal.

Obama will, too. He has already begun, by hitching America back to its roots:

Democracy.