Reviews for Obama’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’
By Eric Etheridge
American Prospect: Ezra Klein says President Obama’s economic speech yesterday at Georgetown University (read the full text; watch it) was “far and away the most coherent and sustained account of Obama’s agenda that the White House has yet offered.”
Huffington Post: Jacob Heilbrunn says that Obama was “cranking high voltage to jump start the shift toward a new American economy.”
President Obama’s audacious economic address at Georgetown University today provided the last swing of the wrecking ball for the shattered remnants of free market fundamentalism. Even as dazed and disoriented members of the GOP stumble around the ruins in a state of cataleptic shock, mumbling over and over to themselves the consolatory phrase that Obama is a socialist, the president doesn’t simply want to tinker with the economy; he’s aiming to lay an entire new foundation over the shards of the failed one. His talk laid out a comprehensive program for what might be called the four R’s: reform, regulation, restructuring, and revival.
Time: Joe Klein says the speech was “quite good.”
In the welter of standard media events and promotions–the White House release of an elaborate pirate tick-tock, for example–there is also a steady effort by the President to speak to us as if we were adults. I’m not sure how much of an impact it’s having, but speeches like this one–and his budget message to the Congress–really raise the level of discourse. You may disagree with his ideas, but he’s not fudging or spinning here. It is a clear, coherent philosophy of governance. And even though none of this is new, it is good to be reminded how all the pieces fit together.
The Atlantic: James Fallows notes a few things he liked about Obama’s speech, inlcuding:
Obama crafted the message with an intellectual thoroughness and emotional steadiness that I think will impress its real audience: not the students sitting at Georgetown or those like me watching live, but the politicians, financiers, and members of the commentariat who will read the text and respond after a little while. He showed he was aware of criticisms and was willing to state them in recognizable form before offering his rebuttal. (Think of the contrast of GW Bush or Cheney acknowledging criticism of their strategy and world view. Or even Richard Nixon.)
And a few things he didn’t like, including:
Maybe it’s only veterans of the Carter Administration who remember this, but “new foundations,” a leitmotif of this speech, was also the motto of one of Carter’s State of the Union addresses 30 years ago. The phrase didn’t catch on then. Or maybe it’s been three decades in gestation.
The Nation: Katrina vanden Heuvel says Obama’s speech was good as far as it went, but that “real and grounded concerns about the administration’s bank bailout plan remain.”
While Obama’s speech lays out some strong principles for a new foundation, the administration’s financial team remains unwilling to understand that we’re not just going through a financial crisis or a panic, but the failure of a whole model of banking. We are living amid the blowback of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good.
If this realization begins to sink in through the failure of the current plan . . . then we’re on the road to laying the foundation, the rock, for a new economy.
Washington Post: Dan Froomkin says the president “failed to persuasively rebut the most urgent critique of his economic policies — one that can’t be written off either to reflexive partisanship from Republicans or defensiveness from the Washington establishment.”
Obama raised it on his own, noting that some critics think he has “been too timid” about shoring up the banking system. “This is essentially the nationalization argument that some of you may have heard.” . . .
But his answer was vague and unconvincing . . .
Obama’s belief has never been in question. It’s the reasoning behind that belief that we’ve been missing, as well as the source of his faith in the judgment of economic advisers. But he once again left us all in the dark on that count.
Clusterstock: Henry Blodget says “Every time we watch Obama speak, our confidence is restored.” But:
That said, we wish Obama didn’t spend so much time hanging out with Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who we assume are responsible for the mistakes Obama continues to make in his diagnosis and treatment of the banking problem.
Plumline: Greg Sargent says it was “noteworthy” that Obama “went out of his way to argue that he isn’t ideologically predisposed against bank nationalization and aggressively rebutted claim that his administration has at times been ideologically predisposed towards letting Wall Street execs off the hook.”
This isn’t a point Obama really needed to make. He could have said that he viewed his prescriptions as more practical than theirs and left it at that.
In a sense, this throws a bit of a wrench into the claim we keep hearing that “Obama is a pragmatist, not an ideologue.” Obama, in a way, is rejecting this frame. He merely has a substantive disagreement with his liberal critics about what would work and what wouldn’t. He’s not rejecting their ideas because they are mired in ideology and his aren’t or because he’s a pragmatist and they’re too far to the “left.”
National Review: Kathryn Jean Lopez wonders about possible changes to the hall where Obama spoke:
Readers have e-mailed that the “IHS” above the Gaston Hall auditorium stage at Georgetown University (a purportedly Catholic school) seems to have gone missing for the presidential economic address earlier today. Perhaps someone wanted to avoid confusion, given that his speech was presented as an economic Sermon on the Mount?
In all seriousness, if the Jesuits there thought removing or otherwise obscuring it would suggest less endorsement of his views (say, on human life . . .), perhaps that was a wise prudential call. But if the White House asked, I think the White House should have been requested to give the speech at George Washington University instead.
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