President Obama on Dec. 5 sounded like the man Americans craved when they voted him into office in 2008.
It was on the promise of hope and change, things this nation badly needed after eight years of George W. Bush, that Obama was swept into the White House as America’s first African-American chief executive.
Obama, however, is a pragmatist and a sincere compromiser. One needs to look no further than the rhetoric Illinois state Sen. Obama used in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention.
Bargains he struck with the Affordable Health Care Act—as great an accomplishment as it was—the Frank-Dodd bill and several other issues left the very people he mesmerized in 2008 deflated and angry.
What followed was a GOP avalanche in the 2010 midterm election, and that apparently convinced Obama that America was going the way of the tea party, and he latched on to a deficit and austerity policy.
Maybe it was the Occupy movement; maybe it was the upcoming 2012 election giving him a brisk slap in the face. Whatever it was, Obama turned back to a new vein of hope and change.
The Monday speech in Osawatomie, Kan.—in the heart of Republican territory—was certain and refreshing.
Channeling Teddy Roosevelt from a 1910 oration, and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, Obama ditched the deficit talk and went straight to a message of fairness and inequality in today’s U.S. economic policy.
The president spoke on how the wealthy need to take responsibility and pay their fair share, the need to invest in infrastructure and education and, most astonishing, he unapologetically proclaimed that in hard times like this Great Recession the federal government is supposed to fill the needs of the middle-class and the working poor, not just the destitute and unemployed.
Obama’s switch to populism brings to mind President Lyndon Johnson’s gambit when he sat at a White House meeting with Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights activists. Johnson told them he could do nothing about the obvious wrongs left by segregation and Jim Crow unless they hit the streets and made him do it.
Occupy hit the streets and made Obama do it.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune.)
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