Obama summons Americans to responsibility

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

In addressing a joint session of Congress and the nation, a president can take different roles.

In 2002, President Bush was a sentinel warning of danger, calling out the “axis of evil” and sounding the alarm over North Korea, Iran and Iraq getting nuclear weapons.

Many times during his presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a captain calling for courage in the face of daunting news.

And in 1965, as a legislative task master, Lyndon Johnson called on Congress to enact civil rights laws.

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama chose to combine all three of these roles.

Praise for Americans' character
His aim was to rally the nation by extolling the extraordinary character of the American people.

“Even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency, and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity,” he said.

The tasks of cutting federal spending, resuscitating the nation’s banking system, and reviving the moribund auto industry would be daunting, he acknowledged.

“None of this will come without cost, nor will it be easy. But this is America. We don't do what's easy,” he declared.

Yet there was a paradox at the heart of his speech.

These tough-minded Americans, so willing to take responsibility, the people who “don’t do what’s easy” were also the same people he blamed early in the speech for being guilty of utter irresponsibility.

An inventory of irresponsibility
“Short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity… we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election… difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day,” he declared.

Obama carefully used the word “we” not “they” in his indictment of Americans' irresponsibility.

The unanswered question in the speech was: Are such people now capable of exercising the responsibility that the president says is needed?

And the applause from the members of Congress in the House chamber was selective in its judgments. It came for Obama’s denunciation of Congress using the budget surplus of 1999-2000 “to transfer wealth to the wealthy.” It also came in his rhetorical attack on those who fly on private jets. But the applause was noticeably absent when the president lamented, not once but twice, that some Americans “bought homes they knew they couldn't afford.”

In some of its passages, Obama’s was a very traditional speech for a Democratic leader to make: Democrats believe that the federal government has a necessary role in finding productive activities in which to invest, or on which to spend, taxpayer dollars.

Obama placed himself squarely in this tradition: “Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down,” he told Congress.

Video   Obama to nation: ‘We will recover’ Feb. 24: In his prime-time speech to Congress and the nation, President Barack Obama focused on the economy, saying, “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves.”

Where to spend, where to cut
Obama was offering a formula for both increasing and cutting federal spending at the same time: Spend more on energy, medicine, and education, but simultaneously spend less on other needs.

But how to spend less on Afghanistan, nuclear submarines, and medical care for the elderly will be left for the president’s budget blueprint and his closed-door bargaining with members of Congress.

While being very Democratic in much of his message, he offered a boosterish line or two that could have come from his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, or from any Republican speechmaker.

“The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach.” He said they would be found partly “in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs.”

And he included a stylistic homage to one of his Republican predecessors by invoking Ronald Reagan’s’ durable trope of “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“We will root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier,” he declared.

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