As the world watched, President Barack Obama spoke before the gathered U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Thankfully, he refused former President Clinton's public suggestion to paste on a cheerful attitude, and he did not preen like Clinton at the numerous standing ovations.
Instead, he took pages from a couple of former Republican presidents. Like Reagan, he focused attention past policy to where attention really belongs, which is people: He gathered a number of people together from all walks of life and, while they sat watching with First Lady Michelle, he told some of their stories: Of a bank exec who gave way his bonus of missions to his employees and former employees. Of a high school student who had the audacity to write to the members of the U.S. Congress about the pitiful conditions at her crumbling small-town school in South Carolina. He quoted her words, "We are not quitters." Like the first Roosevelt, he used the "bully pulpit" to hammer home the necessity to confront huge problems with realism — that is, admit that they are big and painful problems — but also recognize that implicit in those problems are opportunities for those willing to embrace monumental tasks with Mr. Obama's brand of audacious hope. He spoke seriously about his determination to act and did not waste words on either pollyanna prognostications or partisan accusations.
Republicans spent the week preceding the speech visiting radio and TV talk show hosts and commentators, sounding the old saw about "too much government," forgetting that the "government" is just us. "Of the people, by the people and for the people." They justified their complaints by claiming they did not want to saddle future generations with an unbearable burden of debt.
It is revealing that, even before the President's speech, when pundits were grumbling about Mr. Obama's glumness, the public's estimation of Obama's grasp of the situation and his job performance so far is astonishingly positive. Miraculously, the 60+ percent approval rating he held on Election day and Inauguration Day is holding.
Yesterday, Mr. Obama followed his speech with a prosposal for a federal budget in which he intends to follow through on his campaign promises (wouldn't that be a change!). Unlike the previous administration, Mr. Obama has included the cost of waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the budget and proposes cuts that a broad group economists has recommended for years. He's rolling back the "trickle-down" tax-incentives program for the wealthy, a relic of the Reagan era, which has, instead, caused most wealth to "trickle up" at quite a fast clip, contributing to a widening gap between rich and poor. And he's called for regulation that would prevent the kind of brazen, profligate piracy that has passed for investment banking and mortgage lending in the last decade.
Audacious? Yes. Hopeful? That's putting it mildly. Yet, history is on Obama's side. At times of crisis, great leaders — who did not flinch from "impossible" tasks — have set in motion changes that enabled economic development and technological expansion. Lincoln (a Republican) build the first transcontinental railroad despite the financial and human price of our most tragically costly war ever, our own Civil War. At the height of WWII, the second Roosevelt, a Democrat, pushed through the G.I. Bill, despite the greatest national debt we'd ever run up, which gave a generation of returning soldiers college educations that put America first in the world, technologically. Mr. Obama has set his course unflinchingly (and God speed) because he must.
It would have been nice had the terrorists who run Wall Street and the mortgage industry not strapped the monetary equivalent of C4 explosive to the world economy. But Mr. Obama is right: If we the people do not risk acting now to secure renewable energy technologies, rein in health care costs, and make better and higher education available for the youth whose future we have mortgaged, than that generation will have precious little to thank us for when it inherit a debt that will be there anyway in the form of runaway social security and medicare entitlement burdens that, because of a still faltering economy and resulting low GDP. And he was right, therefore, also to call upon Congress to end a quarter century of "ignoring the elephant in the room" and begin to deal with those entitlements now.
More power to you Mr. Obama. Do not flinch or shrink from the task. Stay the course. Do not be intimidated by naysayers among Republicans or distracted by the pettiness of those within your own party who would waste your time and our money extracting a pound of flesh from your predecessor. If either camp has its way, we will sow wind and reap whirlwind.
Keep speaking directly to the folks who put you where you are. Continue to respect the electorate, speak straight with them, don't lie to them, don't coddle them, and don't underestimate them.
Don't give them the government they deserve. They got that with Clinton and Bush. Give them better. That would be a change. With any luck at all, they'll live up to it.
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