Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for Friday, January 23rd.

I'm John Dickerson here with David Plotz in Washington, joined by Emily Bazelon in New Haven.

We're back in the broom closet and in your head from our enjoyable live show last week.

Thanks for all who joined us.

It was this week. It was already this week. It's been a long week. It's been a long week,

and that's one of the troubles with our going back to the inaugural moment, but we haven't talked

about it since it happened. And so, Emily and David, you were both down on the mall, as was I.

So let's just for a moment go back in time to the beginning of this week, which felt like last week.

Emily, your experience on the mall, what did you think of the speech and this whole extraordinary 2 million people, 130 tons of trash event?

Garbage.

I felt like I had the most benevolent mall experience. I mean, I was freezing. I didn't

wear good enough shoes. But I was surrounded by all these people who were so happy to be there and

reaching out to each other. There were two women named Betty who were standing right near me around

the same age, kind of middle-aged. One of them was white. One of them was black. They totally bonded, hugged, had a whole discussion about, like, their childhood sleeping arrangements. And I just felt this incredible wave of anticipation. And the metaphor I ended up using when I wrote was that I felt like the crowd was waiting for Obama to marry them. It was like we were all waiting for him to say, yes, yes, I do. And that everyone needed to really believe that to watch him actually become the president. That was all people cared about. Around me, nobody really cared about the speech. It was just that moment, which, of course, Chief Justice Roberts flubbed. What about you, David? Did you feel? And in which case, what does your wife think? I don't want to marry Barack Obama. She was there. Maybe she wants to marry Barack Obama. I had a very similar experience to Emily, except I guess I had the curse and blessing of bringing my children down. So we brought our three children down. Do you think you should have said blessing and curse?

The blessing first?

No, blessing second.

It leaves the emphasis.

It's like the curse is the...

The curse is like it was zero degrees.

They were incredibly cold.

It was...

We had to walk in immense distance that none of them like crowds and liking crowds in the cold, not possible.

...