So courtesy of the White House, here’s an advance copy of excerpts from the speech President Obama is set to give at CMU this afternoon.
I’d have posted it sooner, but I wanted to find a reference to an actual policy proposal first. And as you’ll see, that took awhile. It’s not until the second-to-last paragraph that he actually mentions a tax on carbon pollution. First we get numerous paragraphs bashing the GOP … and THEN we’re assured that the President “want[s] to move forward.”
Oh well … partial remarks follow:
America does not stand still. We move forward. That is why I’ve said that as we emerge from this recession, we cannot return to the pre-crisis status quo. We cannot go back to an economy that was too dependent on bubbles and debt and financial speculation. We cannot accept economic growth that leaves the middle-class owing more and making less. We must build a new, stronger foundation for growth and prosperity — and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the last sixteen months.
It’s a foundation based on investments in our people and their future. Investments in the skills and education we need to compete. Investments in a 21st century infrastructure for America — from high-speed railroads to high-speed internet. Investments in research and technology, like clean energy, that can lead to new jobs and new exports and new industries.
This new foundation is also based on reforms that will make our economy stronger and our businesses more competitive — reforms that will make health care cheaper, our financial system more secure, and our government less burdened with debt.
…
Now, some of you may have noticed that we have been building this foundation without much help from our friends in the other party. From our efforts to rescue the economy to health insurance reform to financial reform, most have sat on the sidelines and shouted from the bleachers. They said no to tax cuts for small businesses; no to tax credits for college tuition; no to investments in clean energy. They said no to protecting patients from insurance companies and consumers from big banks.
…
But to be fair, a good deal of the other party’s opposition to our agenda has also been rooted in their sincere and fundamental belief about government. It’s a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges. It’s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations.
…
As November approaches, leaders in the other party will campaign furiously on the same economic argument they’ve been making for decades. Fortunately, we don’t have to look back too many years to see how it turns out. For much of the last ten years, we tried it their way. They gave tax cuts that weren’t paid for to millionaires who didn’t need them. They gutted regulations, and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight. They shortchanged investments in clean energy and education; in research and technology. And despite all their current moralizing about the need to curb spending, this is the same crowd who took the record $237 billion surplus that President Clinton left them and turned it into a record $1.3 trillion deficit.
So we already know where their ideas led us. And now we have a choice as a nation. We can return to the failed economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future. We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward.
I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward.
…
The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf right now may prove to be a result of human error — or corporations taking dangerous short-cuts that compromised safety. But we have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth – risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes. Just like we have to acknowledge that an America run solely on fossil fuels should not be the vision we have for our children and grandchildren.
The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future. That means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks more energy efficient. It means tapping into our natural gas reserves, and moving ahead with our plan to expand our nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants. And it means rolling back billions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development.
But the only way the transition to clean energy will succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed. And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.
…
The House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill, and there is currently a plan in the Senate — a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans — that would achieve the same goals. The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months. I will make the case for a clean energy future wherever I can, and I will work with anyone from either party to get this done. But we will get this done. The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century. We will not move back. America will move forward.
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2010.
We are in the midst of a fascinating dance being performed by Obama and company. It was a reasonable assumption to think that BP should be the entity to clean up this mess (since apparently not many other entities have the equipment to handle this). Obama also expressed measured amounts of anger, apparently entirely too measured for many pundit. I guess the pundits think that if Obama pops a vein, it might make BP think he is serious (as opposed to actually rolling back some of the government subsidies to the oil industry).
Just today it was announced that the Justice Department would consider criminal charges for BP personnel. I guess the get out of jail free card Obama had slipped BP’s management had an expiration date. There is also a thought that may be drifting in the back of some people’s minds, that if we didn’t use so much oil, maybe this spill wouldn’t have occurred. And I notice that in the speech excerpt above there are some indicators of that, references to more efficient cars and a carbon tax. But it is only baby steps. Obama is careful to mention natural gas and nuclear power even while talking about efficiency, and in the sections you excerpted, no mention of solar and/or wind power.
As I say, a fascinating dance. Just exactly how much can Obama push his agenda until conservatives start screaming? Quite possibly only a speech or two.
Chris, are you implying that the president might have tossed off a few nice-sounding platitudes strictly for political purposes?
Well! I never expected this kind of cynicism from City Paper!
(clutches pearls)
Haha. Ordinarily, I’m all in favor of partisan cheap-shots. Just ask anyone who’s read my column. (If you can find somebody willing to admit having done so.) But I did feel pretty let down that, at a moment where it’s PAINFULLY obvious how much our energy choices are going to cost, the White House decided to play up the same old attack lines. It’s not even that I disagree with any of what he said in terms of Republican obstructionism. But our politics have never been sillier, while the problems have rarely been more serious. It’s disappointing to see Obama become a part of that. I EXPECT it from the other side.
Why would you have expected anything else from him, Chris? Because he SAID he wouldn’t?
At the risk of making Jason clutch his pearls again… I’m just cynical enough to believe that what a politician says on the campaign trail and what he does in the Oval Office will often bear little resemblance to one another.
And if you aren’t expecting that from the Democratic side too, then — I would say you’re not paying attention, but I know better — you’re fooling yourself.
Maybe it’s about time people start admitting that that TWM crank may have been right after all: Obama is smarter and more flowery-voiced than most, but his words and deeds are often at odds, and he sure as hell ain’t some new kind of politician.
@ Chad —
Hey, I’m never gonna deny an online commentator the right to say “I told you so.” That’s one of the chief attractions of online commentating, as far as I can tell. Even so, I’d like to think I was a bit less starry-eyed about Obama than you seem to be assuming. You’re talking to the guy who, while covering Bob Casey’s endorsement of Barack Obama more than two years ago, said the following:
“Every politician does what Obama does — pledge to change the Beltway culture and remake the country from the ground up. And it’s not that I saw Obama do anything special to make people believe it. From what I could see, the people in that room were believers already … [L]ater in his speech, Obama derided those doubters who once thought he needed the support of party insiders in order to win. More than a few Obama supporters, I’ll wager, thought Bob Casey was just such an insider as recently as 24 hours ago. (And they would STILL have thought so had Casey backed Clinton.) But Obama has reached that heady point where he can have it both ways — scooping up the support of party insiders, while at the same time pledging to take those insiders on.”
http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A44299
(In other words: I TOLD YOU SO. Ahhh, I never get tired of it.)
But the question is: Did I have to be swept up in Obama’s rhetoric back then to feel disappointed by it now? Was I wrong to think he might live up to a higher standard than the GOP, and to be upset that he chose not to do so yesterday? And if I WAS wrong, what possible reason could I have had for voting in the first place?
Look, I voted for the dude, like 95 percent of alt-weekly editors. (I’m assuming the rest voted for Nader — some scars don’t heal.) Voting for someone is always an act of faith to some extent. If you truly believed all the candidates were the same, there’d be no point in bothering. The part of me that bothered back in November of 2008 is the part of me that’s disappointed today. Here is a guy facing a singular crisis — an environmental and economic disaster of historic proportions — and he offers up a speech that could have been delivered on any given Wednesday afternoon over the last 20 years.
That stinks. And it doesn’t just stink for the people who thought Obama was going to “transform politics” or any of that. It ALSO stinks for those of us who thought that he was merely capable of nudging politics in a healthier direction. Some days he’s done that, I think. But when he had a chance to do it yesterday, he blew it.
Chris —
Just to be clear, I wasn’t “I told you so”ing you. I full well remember your reservations. I also remember that you were one who, even as you disagreed with me at times, never called me a kook or a racist or a right-wing nut job for daring to write what I was writing. I appreciated that, just as I do everything that you’re writing today.
My comment, obviously, was not as clear as it should have been. I was, indeed, asking you some rhetorical questions, all of which you answered greatly. But that last paragraph was most decidedly not directed at you — rather, at the many, many people who did call me those things, and who could never quite fathom that the Kool Aid they were drinking might have had far more sugar, and far less juice, than they thought.
I’ll be touching on this in the Friday Notes, and then again in a long-form post next week, but for now, consider today’s Tony Norman’s column:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10155/1063011-153.stm?cmpid=bcpanel0#ixzz0psmwddtv
It’s all worth a read, but here’s the money line: “Accountability is as much a dirty word for Mr. Obama as it was for President George W. Bush.”
When you start reading things like that, and indeed like the rest of the column, you know that the biggest change President Obama brought has been in people’s perceptions of him.