The President’s big speech today

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you haven’t had a chance to watch this speech, please do, I’ll wait…otherwise, the transcript is here, helpfully provided by the LA Times.  By way of background, the location of the speech today was a city in Kansas where, 101 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech famously calling for a “New Nationalism” and proposing his “Square Deal” to the American people.  Was President Obama being slightly ambitious in his choice of historical contextualization?  Perhaps, but to my mind it was well worth the risk.

Now then.  While this speech was touted as an “economic” speech, the tenor and content ranged far more widely than simple concepts of supply and demand.  President Obama laid out a new framework for the American economy, with the explicit goal being to rebuild and expand the middle class.  He made the argument that government should not try to “fix” all the problems of society, but that government should work on behalf of the people’s interests.

With a forcefulness that has been heretofore lacking in most of his presidential speeches, President Obama called out greed, irresponsibility, and the continuing fallacy that is “trickle-down economics.”  He called for new rules of the road that apply to everyone, not just to Main Street, but to Wall Street as well.  He defended the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and made a stirring statement about the importance of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its soon-to-be-blocked Director nominee, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. 

One of the more memorable phrases to come out of the speech is President Obama’s term “you’re on your own economics” to characterize the preferred economic plan of the GOP.  The contrast came with President Obama’s insistence that American prosperity, long-term prosperity, is gained together, in contrast to the “YoYo” economic ideas of the GOP. 

But President Obama’s speech led up to what I felt was the culminating point: illustrating for the American people that there is a different form of capitalism available; one that is more responsible and ultimately self-sustaining than the winner-take-all capitalism we’ve endured the past 30 years.  The President spoke of Marvin Windows, of Warroad, Minnesota, and described (skip to the last 7 or so minutes of the video clip to catch it) how the company has never laid off a single worker in its 100+ year history, despite enduring the Great Depression and the ongoing Great Recession.  How did Marvin achieve that feat?  Simple; through shared sacrifice from both the workforce and the management when times have been tough.  The President didn’t get into details, obviously, but his simple illustration of what could be summed up for the audience that change, true change, is within our grasp if we see each other as fellow citizens, and recognize that prosperity will be gained through helping each other out, rather than shorting each other constantly.  Responsible capitalism is what we ought to strive for, rather than a corporate ethos solely driven by the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

The President attacked inequality sharply, broadly, and directly, and proposed some new/old ideas to guide us out of the predicament we find ourselves in as a nation.  If it was a speech somewhat lacking in the soaring rhetoric of campaign Obama of 2008, the sober tone reflected the weighty concerns facing the man as President.  In time, I believe this speech will be seen to be a major one, where he describes the economic goalposts as they have been set for the past number of decades, and proposes that we, as a nation, make the effort to shift them back so that the goal is within the majority’s reach once again.  This speech sets the stage for the 2012 campaign, surely, but it also challenges Americans to greater collective achievements. 

I don’t normally watch presidential speeches, but this one had me riveted from the start.  I’ll give Greg Sargent the last word on this topic, the final paragraph of a typically insightful blog post on the speech:

Political scientists will tell you that individual speeches don’t matter; and that grand themes are very unlikely to supplant the direct experience of the economy as a motivator of voters. But we’ll be hearing these themes countless times between now and election day. And anyone who had hoped that Obama and Dems would make an unapologetically populist and moral case against inequality and economic injustice central to Campaign 2012 should be pretty pleased with what they heard today.