mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

“More Resolute, More Seasoned”: President Obama’s Inaugural Address Was A Modern Speech Steeped In History

President Obama gave a truly American speech yesterday. It resonated from the opening reference to “all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights,” to his constant refrain of “we, the people.”

It was in many ways a stronger speech than four years ago, more resolute, more seasoned, more ready to ensure that America lives up to the words expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It was a speech for a modern era, acknowledging the rapid change of the 21st century.

The strong thread of his speech was the strong history of America, from the war for independence to the emancipation proclamation 150 years ago to the March on Washington 50 years ago. “From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall,” the President highlighted the guiding value that all are created equal. The age-old creed was made modern and relevant to all Americans — of any color, any natural origin, any gender, any sexual orientation.

The notion that an inaugural address would mention gay marriage and highlight the start of the gay revolution at Stonewall would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago. What an amazing transformation.

The melding of traditional aspirational values and the struggle to solve modern American problems was inspiring. He was forward looking and pragmatic when it came to tackling the issues of immigration reform, climate change, equal economic opportunity, helping the most vulnerable. And he was equally pragmatic when he recognized that “outworn programs are inadequate to our times” and that government is not the answer to all our problems.

But his was a defense of government as “we, the people” to achieve what our framers designed. He did not deride government or Washington but set out a positive, progressive, future for us to pursue together. This was a change from what we have heard over the past thirty years.

It was, in many ways, a very modern speech clothed in the best of our history to act as a call to Americans. This is a president now comfortable with the bully pulpit and a leader committed to using it in the years ahead. You will see a Barack Obama ready to inspire and organize people for the cause. My guess is that this speech was just the beginning.

 

By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, January 22, 2013

January 24, 2013 Posted by | Inauguration 2013 | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Promises Of Our Founding”: President Obama’s Unapologetic Inaugural Address

President Obama used his inaugural address to make a case – a case for a progressive view of government, and a case for the particular things that government should do in our time.

He gave a speech in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural and Ronald Reagan’s first: Like both, Obama’s was unapologetic in offering an argument for his philosophical commitments and an explanation of the policies that naturally followed. Progressives will be looking back to this speech for many years, much as today’s progressives look back to FDR’s, and conservatives to Reagan’s.

Obama will be seen as combative in his direct refutation of certain conservative ideas, and it was especially good to see him argue — in a passage that rather pointedly alluded to Paul Ryan’s worldview — that social insurance programs encourage rather than discourage risk-taking and make us a more, not less, dynamic society. “The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us,” he said. “They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.” This is one of the most important arguments liberals have made since FDR’s time, and in the face of an aggressive attack now on the very idea of a social insurance state, it was important that Obama make it again.

Yet the president pitched his case by basing it on a long, shared American tradition. He rooted his egalitarian commitments in the promises of our founding. The Declaration of Independence was the driving text– as it was for Martin Luther King, whom we also celebrated today, and as it was for Abraham Lincoln.

Obama’s refrain “We, the people” reminded us that “we” is the very first word of our Constitution and that a commitment to community and the common good is as American Washington, Adams and Jefferson. The passages invoking that phrase spoke of shared responsibility – “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” “We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.” Obama said a powerful “no” to radical individualism (a point my colleague Greg Sargent made well earlier today in the course of a kind and generous reference to my book “Our Divided Political Heart”).

Some will no doubt think (and write) that Obama should have sought more lofty and non-partisan ground. The problem with this critique is that it asks Obama to speak as if the last four years had not happened. It asks him to abandon the arguments he has been making for nearly two years. It asks us to pretend that we do not have a great deal at stake in the large debate over government’s role that we have been having over an even longer period.

Neither Roosevelt nor Reagan gave in to such counsel of philosophical timidity, and both of their speeches are worth rereading in light of Obama’s.

“We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it,” Roosevelt declared. “[W]e recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. . . . We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.”

“In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan said. “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.”

Like these two presidents, Obama offered his fellow citizens the “why” behind what he thought and what he proposed to do — a point made to me after the speech by former Rep. Dave Obey. In my most recent column, I argued that Obama’s re-election (and the way he won it) had liberated him to be “more at ease declaring exactly what he is for and what he is seeking to achieve.” And that is exactly what he did in this speech.

 

By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 21, 2013

January 22, 2013 Posted by | Inauguration 2013 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“President Obama Is So Mean”: Conservative Projection Takes a New Angle

Peggy Noonan is, without doubt, America’s most hilariously ridiculous opinion columnist, someone forever pleading that we ignore piffle like “facts” and focus instead on the collective emotions that are bubbling just out of our awareness until she identifies them. But in her column today, she does something that we ought to take note of, because I suspect it will become a common Republican talking point. Noonan asks why Obama is so darn mean to Republicans, and answers the question thusly:

Here’s my conjecture: In part it’s because he seems to like the tension. He likes cliffs, which is why it’s always a cliff with him and never a deal. He likes the high-stakes, tottering air of crisis. Maybe it makes him feel his mastery and reminds him how cool he is, unrattled while he rattles others. He can take it. Can they?

He is a uniquely polarizing figure. A moderate U.S. senator said the other day: “One thing not said enough is he is the most divisive president in modern history. He doesn’t just divide the Congress, he divides the country.” The senator thinks Mr. Obama has “two whisperers in his head.” “The political whisperer says ‘Don’t compromise a bit, make Republicans look weak and bad.’ Another whisperer is not political, it’s, ‘Let’s do the right thing, work together and begin to right the ship.'” The president doesn’t listen much to the second whisperer.

Ah yes, we keep having these fiscal crises because Obama “likes cliffs.” Don’t you remember when he convinced conservative Republicans to hold the national economy hostage over the debt ceiling in 2011? And you do know that he’s forcing them to do the same thing in a couple of months, right? They don’t want to, but he’s making them. Those congressional Republicans are desperate to compromise with him, but he just won’t accept all their generous offers! And he sure is “polarizing.” After all, if a majority of Republicans have consistently believed that Obama is lying about being born in Hawaii and is a foreigner, and if his opponents regularly charge that when he adopts Republican ideas on things like health care it’s because he is a socialist motivated by a hatred of America, then there’s really only one person to blame. And when a member of the Republican Senate leadership writes, “It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country,” that just shows how much Obama loves creating these crises! And what do you know, in that op-ed, Senator John Cornyn makes the same argument, that in all of the crises of the last couple of years, “the White House has purposefully slow-walked the process in a shameless attempt to score cheap political points.”

Mark my words, over the next couple of months we’re going to be hearing this a lot: Republicans will argue that these crises are all Obama’s fault not so much because his ideas are substantively wrong (they’ll mention that too, of course), but because he just wants it that way. And because he’s so mean.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 4, 2013

January 5, 2013 Posted by | Politics | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Lighting Darkness, Healing Heartbreak, Finding Meaning”: Obama’s Newtown Shooting Speech Was Best Of His Presidency

In an hour of crisis and grief, the president has to tell the country some hard truths about itself. As he does that, he must also explain what it’s all about, this country called America, all over again. President Obama did just that, at about the halfway mark of the two terms he was elected to serve. He looked as if he had aged a few years in a day.

In his words, depth, and demeanor, Obama gave the best speech of his presidency by a country mile in a New England town Sunday evening. They say there are “no words” when you are swimming in salt tears over the loss of a child. But when a town’s children are killed in cold blood, along with six women working at a school, well, there must be words for the blood. There must be words that try to tell the tragedy we have seen, for words are all we have.

The president is the only one who can do that—speak to the shattered people of Newtown, Conn., and to us, the American people, to make us one. We are all implicated; our society’s fingerprints were all over that crime scene. So the truth is, we really need a talking-to about gun violence, a truth that few can speak and be heard. Thankfully, the president uttered words that went beyond the usual suspects at another mass shooting.

Speaking in sad cadences, Obama asked: “Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough, and we will have to change….We can’t tolerate this anymore.”

Here he shows how hard it is to ask and answer fundamental questions. Why were women and children brutally robbed of life and liberty Friday? Isn’t the pursuit of happiness part of the meaning of this nation, formulated in a fine 1776 declaration?

Obama didn’t spell out the broken promises, but there was no need. We’re all in this together, a sense that we failed and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. If we fail to protect our precious cargo of children, he was saying, nothing else matters very much. That struck a note of truth which resonated far beyond the boundaries of a place called Newtown, which they started building in 1780—four years following that fine declaration.

David Maraniss, the distinguished biographer of Obama and a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, believes the Newtown speech will live long in memory. “He [the president] defined a grave moment with simple and powerful thoughts that worked on several levels at once, both particular and universal,” he said.

President Lincoln gave a stark speech about national loss at the midway of his four years as the Civil War president. He gave it in the autumnal light of November, consecrating a battlefield where the fury of cannons sounded and bloody bodies stained the farm soil for the first three days of July 1863.

Nobody knew better than he, the deaths and suffering were so great he had to heal with words as best he could, to infuse the event and sacrifice with solemn meaning. Theatrically, he set the time and scene: “Fourscore and seven years ago….We are met on a great battlefield of that war.” Then came a short speech that magnificently transcended time and space to give a new fresh explanation for why they were there that day, what they were fighting for, and what it was all about.

For Lincoln, the Civil War had ceased to stand just for keeping the Southern states. As many of us recited in the Gettysburg Address as schoolchildren, the cause was “a new birth of freedom” in the nation. By a stroke of the pen, Lincoln had earlier emancipated all slaves in the “rebellion” states.

Maraniss said the Newtown address may be Obama’s Gettysburg: “If we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no.” That simple candor helped me deal with the shared sorrow. Better not to sugarcoat at a time like this.

Lighting darkness, healing heartbreak, finding meaning—it’s a lot to ask of a president and his words. But on Sunday, the man from Illinois answered the call.

 

By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, December 18, 2012

December 19, 2012 Posted by | Gun Violence, Guns | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Not Even Close”: Obama’s Got A Bigger Mandate Than The GOP, And A Bully Pulpit

Does he or doesn’t he? Does President Obama have a mandate from the voters heading into his second term or not? That question has been argued back and forth for a week now, and will continue to be sparred over for months to come. But with most of the votes counted in the country, we can say this with some certainty: He’s got more of a mandate than do House Republicans.

Not surprisingly, the GOP and its allies have taken a strong stand against any Obama mandate. Per Politico, here’s Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, this year’s losing vice presidential nominee:

When asked if Obama had a mandate on taxes, Romney’s running mate told ABC News: “I don’t think so, because they also re-elected the House Republicans. So whether people intended or not, we’ve got divided government.”

He continued: “This is a very close election, and unfortunately divided government didn’t work very well the last two years. We’re going to have to make sure it works in the next two years.”

Let’s unpack that. First off, Ryan undercuts his own point with the caveat about “whether people intended or not.” It’s hard to claim a countermandate while admitting that it may be an unintentional one. And in fact if you look at the vote totals, it’s hard to claim a countermandate at all, given that more people voted for House Democratic candidates than voted for Republicans. According to a running tally compiled by the Rothenberg Report’s House editor, David Wasserman, House Democratic candidates got 56.3 million votes last week, while House GOP-ers got only 56.1 million. Republicans were saved by the fact that the last round of redistricting gave them a structural advantage in terms of the congressional map. Democratic voters tend to be concentrated, especially in cities, so they got more votes in fewer districts.

Ryan goes on to assert that, “this is a very close election.” But is it really? I think Charlie Cook has it right here:

It’s certainly true that 51 percent (rounding up from 50.5) to 48 percent is close, but since the end of World War II, five elections have been closer. Mitt Romney won only two more states (Indiana and North Carolina) than John McCain did, and even if he had won Florida, the GOP nominee would still have needed to win Ohio, Virginia, and either Colorado or Iowa, based on the sequence of the election margins.

The danger for Republicans clinging to that solace is that it sidesteps the inconvenient truth that they have now lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, from 1992 on. For the GOP, this was more than one bad night.

And while we’re on the topic of presidential vote totals, according to Wasserman’s figures, Obama won 62.9 million votes. So if the House GOP wants to compare mandate size, 6.8 million more people voted for Obama and his clearly stated policy of raising taxes on the wealthy than voted for House Republicans.

Look, I think that talk of mandates is overblown and anachronistic. If Obama had won, say, 350 electoral votes and close to 54 percent of the vote would Republicans concede that he had a mandate and cooperate in policymaking? That’s what he got four years ago and all the GOP gave him was gridlock, noncooperation, and suggestions of political illegitimacy. And while we’re recalling recent history, recall that when George W. Bush won re-election eight years ago with a smaller percentage of the vote, the Wall Street Journal called it a “decisive mandate.”

Meanwhile Obama plans to hit the hustings to gin up support for his position in the upcoming battle over the wildly misnamed “fiscal cliff.” We’ll see how well that turns out—the power of the president in situations like this is often overstated—but mandate or no, he indisputably has the “bully pulpit.”

 

By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, November 14, 2012

November 14, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »