(Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
President Barack Obama spoke at the event "Together We Thrive: Tucson and America" honoring the January 8 shooting victims at McKale Memorial Center on the University of Arizona campus on January 12, 2011.
By Peter S. Canellos
January 23, 2011
In those breathless days between Barack Obama’s victory and inauguration, his young speechwriter, Jon Favreau, jogged by the Lincoln Memorial and felt the tug of history. He was at work on Obama’s inaugural address, and here, at the feet of the Great Emancipator, more than 3 million people would gather to hear his and Obama’s words.
Brilliant. Moving. Eloquent. The adjectives used to describe Obama’s previous speeches sparkled like quotes on a movie marquee.
“Dude, what you’re writing is going to be hung up in people’s living rooms!” Obama aide Bill Burton reportedly enthused to Favreau.
Those who came craving Obama’s soaring references to America’s past and promise would not go home empty-handed. There was a long anecdote about Valley Forge. A tribute to “a parent’s willingness to nurture a child.” A call to listen to “the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington [and] whisper through the ages.” A reminder of “the bitter swill of civil war and segregation.”
When it was over, the audience applauded lustily. By the end of the day, copies of the speech were rolling off the presses, and commemorative booklets began rocketing up the bestseller lists.
Much later, though, writers led by The New Republic’s John B. Judis would focus on other aspects of the speech, such as the line that declared, “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”
As Obama spoke, Democrats were preparing to defend the bank bailout and extend it to Detroit, where overfed executives and intransigent unions had driven the auto industry into the ground. Also in the offing was a financial-reform bill that banks would oppose with all their power. These initiatives depended on voters believing that Obama’s policies would punish those whose caused the crisis and assist those who suffered.
Yet here was Obama, spreading the blame beyond the executives, beyond the Bush administration, to a collective failure to grapple with new realities. The line may have projected Obama as a national father, dispensing wisdom and facing up to hard truths. But it failed utterly in advancing the program that Democrats were preparing. Pretty soon, the public was blaming Obama for subsidizing failed bankers.
Then, when the deficit began to grow, Obama stressed the need for belt-tightening while making a lawyerly distinction between the long-term and short-term deficit; what he failed to drive home was that the programs that temporarily ballooned the deficit were emergency measures to cure the economy.
Then, when the administration focused on health-insurance reform, the administration and its allies adopted the easy, emotional shorthand of rescuing those without insurance, rather than stressing that health care costs were strangling the economy. Thus, to many, the Democratic plan seemed a discretionary item, a new kind of welfare, and Obama, despite studies showing that the health bill would actually cut the deficit, was unable to correct that impression. Continued...
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