The president’s latest speech at the University of Richmond was again disappointing, playing to the audience but not offereing anything substantive.
As Obama said: nothing in the Jobs Acts was “radical”, the ideas were supported by both parties, it will create more jobs for ‘everybody’, and will rebuild our “crumbling” infrastructures. He reflected back the worries and hopes of his audience (and even got an amen at one point), pointed out that District politicians had spent the summer legitimately “fussing over the budget”, then talked about his ambitious plan. Reduce the deficit, be fair to everybody, make businesses more efficient, build a stronger economy. He said he was optimistic.
When the president accepted the Democratic nomination at Mile High Stadium in 2008, he was a different person.
The economic failure was a “direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush”. He called out his opponent “on health care and education and the economy” saying, “Senator McCain has been anything but independent, ” because “John McCain doesn’t get it.”
Candidate Obama said that business has a responsibility to the American people to create jobs, government must do the things “which we cannot do for ourselves.” He would stop tax breaks to corporations, end the dependence on Middle East oil, and give people without health insurance the same coverage as members of Congress. “America,” he challenged, “now is not the time for small plans.”
That speech and those ideas were audacious. Before the election, Candidate Obama gave people hope that things would be different, that he would be different, that he would usher in a new era of politics that would be different. That has not happened.
Instead, we saw a slow reversion to politics as usual. While under full democratic control, both the Senate and the House both passed healthcare bills. The President chose to take the weaker Senate bill and align the House, rather than taking the comprehensive House bill and bring the Senate around. Democratic Congressman Zack Space voted against the final bill because “Congress could have done better.” But Democratic leaders chose not to be audacious and risk a filibuster.
Instead, it was Bill Clinton who was now audacious during the “fuss” over the debt ceiling, saying Obama could simply ignore it, continue to pay the bills, and let the courts sort it out. Rather than work it out behind closed doors, bring the fight out into the open and let the world watch.
In the recent budget struggles over the past years, President Obama and Democratic leaders again let the implied threat of filibuster dilute their actions. The Bush tax cuts were renewed with little long-term gain. Where was the audacity to force Republicans to actually filibuster on the floor of the Senate, and let the American people watch elected officials for days defend tax breaks for the Waltons and the Kochs? An audacious moment, lost.
In this latest speech the words were the same, the heart-rending examples were there, the empathy was felt, but it all rang hollow based on the reality of the past three years. Ambitious is not audacious. “Nothing radical” is not audacious. Fair, efficient, and optimistic are all good, but none are audacious. People who supported Obama in 2008 continue to have hope of audacity, hope that the audacious man they elected will at some point emerge.
Before his nomination, a friend asked me to name Obama’s key defining characteristic. There were too many options: progressive, “first black president”, audacious, kind, open — the list could go on. He shook his head and told me, “He’s a Chicago politician.”
That is an insight we should have should have understood from the beginning.
