President Barack Obama has just finished giving a big speech about the economy. You can tell it was a big speech because it has a name: “A New Foundation,” to be precise. In the address, delivered at Georgetown University on the eve of Tax Day (and a number of Republican protests, if the GOP echo chamber is to be believed), the president once again showed remarkable message discipline with a 46-minute speech, rather like his talk on race in March 2008, almost completely scrubbed of sound bites.
After explaining the credit crisis in detail usually reserved for arty videos or graduate level seminars, he made a forceful, and convincing argument for Keynesian economics—perhaps a presidential first—and "why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand." As confusing as this crisis can be, and as dunderheaded as opponents of Obama's spending binge have been, it's great news that the president has decided to speak in "prose, not poetry."
Going into the last two weeks of his first 100 days in office, Obama was also fairly self-promotional, calling the Recovery Act, the TARP program, the mortgage refinancing program, the Detroit bailout and the $1 trillion pledged collectively at the G-20 summit, “extraordinary action—action that has been unprecedented in both its scale and its speed.” Smartly, Obama then cut off at the pass any idea that the recession is “over,” which, given the news of unexpected profits at first Wells Fargo and then Goldman Sachs, has been a recent whisper. "There is much more work to be done," he said, promising "an unrelenting, unyielding, day-by-day effort from this administration to fight for economic recovery on all fronts."
He then ticked off the "five pillars" of this new era; policy areas that he’s signaled again and again as the most important to his term as president: health care cost reduction, energy action and a sane climate policy, competitive education across the board, and an accounting for years of fiscal disaster. He even co-opted the typical conservative whine on entitlements wtih the retort that "health care reform is entitement reform."
Does this ever get old? Dancing between optimism and gloomy predictions, cheerleading and indignation, Obama showed once more his willingness to treat Americans like adults. He also admonished the nation with words from the Sermon on the Mount, which
tells the story of two men. The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was destroyed as soon as the storm hit. But the second is known as the wise man, for when “…the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house…it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”
We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock.
Hear, hear. In the first days of the Easter season, this explicitly Christian language seems only appropriate. And when Obama deviated from his remarks briefly, it was to encourage American kids to avoid "manipulating numbers"—as investment bankers and real estate profiteers, and get back to "making things"—as engineers, manufacturers, and other skilled tradespeople. Can't get more solid than that!
Lastly, and most interesting to me was Obama’s tacked-on bit of media criticism, in which he railed against
an impatience that characterizes this town – an attention span that has only grown shorter with the twenty-four news cycle, and insists on instant gratification in the form of instant results or higher poll numbers. When a crisis hits, there’s all too often a lurch from shock to trance, with everyone responding to the tempest of the moment until the furor has died away and the media coverage has moved on, instead of confronting the major challenges that will shape our future in a sustained and focused way.
Having apologized in advance for "a slightly longer speech," Obama brought Georgetown the same type of shaming device he used to great effect in “A More Perfect Union.” And in doing so during remarks on the economy, he (like Jon Stewart) practically begged those covering this speech and others to do their jobs far better, educating Americans not on the intricacies of, say, a foolish bow or a threatened protest, but rather the complex legislative upheavals that have marked the first 100 days of Obama’s presidency.
So read the whole thing here (PDF).
—DAYO OLOPADE
Covers the White House and Washington for The Root. Follow her on Twitter.