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Those of us hoping that President Obama would be known for his clever rhetorical one-liners will probably be disappointed. He speaks more in narrative forms: in short stories and letters, not headlines. So it's probably appropriate that the best line of his inaugural speech for me was from the Apostle Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians: "the time has come to set aside childish things."

This is a call for a new type of politics, a new practice of citizenship, and a new type of "infrastructure."

President Obama called upon citizens — the public — to get to work helping to address the problems we face as a nation. The literal meaning of "public" is "a mature people" — a person or group (or nation) that has crossed the threshold from childishness to adulthood and is capable of self-governance.

Over the past 16 years, most of our politics on both the left and the right has been avowedly childish, and the country has paid the price for it. Partisanship and adherence to ideological dogma, including supposedly clever political one-liners, have prevented us from solving the problems of today and of the next generation. We've built organizations and systems and incentives to fuel this immaturity, and we're paying the price, literally and figuratively.

This move to democratic adulthood will require a new politics as mature as its people. A politics based on the ability to come together to solve problems, to govern for the common good, to act on the policies we know we must take: to rebuild the civic infrastructure in all institutions that is as important as rebuilding our physical and economic infrastructure.

Sean Kershaw is the executive director of the Citizens League.