Anyone on the Mall yesterday will tell you: The crowd's favorite performer by a good margin was Garth Brooks, who played a raucous medley of "American Pie," "Shout" and his own "We Shall Be Free." (I don't want to shock, but the audience at Barack Obama's inauguration concert preferred the non-country numbers.) Brooks has been semi-retired for the entire Bush presidency, but maybe Obama can lure him back to work with a certain open cabinet position: After all, it might be helpful if a key voice on the new president's economic team got a little bit louder now (hey!).
--Ben Wasserstein