What Will Obama Say in His "Reaganesque" Address to Congress?

by Damozel | We could just wait till tonight when he will actually say it, of course, and find out then.  But why do that, in the era of hints and leaks and pre-event punditry? CNN reports:

President Obama's address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress will have a heavy emphasis on the economy and will try to strike an optimistic tone, aides said....

That's a sign Obama has heard the criticism, including from former President Clinton, that he needs to mix sober talk with an upbeat bottom line.

"He believes we will meet these challenges and lift ourselves out of this" recession, one top aide said. "He will say, 'The best days are ahead of us.' "

The address will be "thematic" and won't get into much detail on Obama's plans to deal with the credit crunch and housing crisis, aides said. The broad theme will be that the country needs to look forward to solve the financial crisis, they said....

Obama will lay out the economic challenges he has been discussing in recent weeks and suggest many people will have to sacrifice to dig out of the problems, a theme he hit Monday at a fiscal responsibility summit at the White House....

He "will build on the need to make sure we begin to make tough choices" to deal with the $1.3 trillion annual budget deficit burying the federal government, one of the aides said.

Obama, a self-described "eternal optimist," is expected to talk about the responsibility everyone has to help get the country back on track, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Sounds good to me:  a realistic assessment of where we are combined with hopeful speculation about where it might take us sounds like just the ticket.  

“He will,” Gibbs said, “tell the country that we’ve faced … greater challenges than the ones we face now, but we as Americans always meet those challenges. But in the Reaganesque words, there are always better days ahead.” (Politico)

I lived through the Reagan era and I couldn't stand Ronald Reagan.  I haven't forgotten that or anything, but all right...Obama is going to be that guy, at least in tone. I take it that "Reaganesque" has become a synonym for "reassuringly optimistic" and we are a people who like our leaders to be optimistic on our behalf.

As I recently remarked, there is value in recognizing that bad times don't last forever, any more than good times do.  When the glass is half-empty, it's also half-full, and also has room in it for more to be poured in. We haven't had much opportunity to practice old-fashioned American virtues in these last 20 years.  Even after 9-11 our government urged us to crawl back into our comfy cocoons and just carry on as if nothing had happened.

Memeorandum has more.

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Comments

[sue]

I can't wait to hear our President speak tonight, I am a glass half full person and I am offended by these ranting conservative bloggers who have nothing at all good to say and would not even agree that its gonna take them to also join in this fight to bring our country back to prosperity! I believe the republicans are praying for Obama to fail, they don't realize if this country goes down they go down with it!

[Adam]

As far as everything I have read suggests, Gibbs only mentioned Reagan in reference to that one particular quote. All the "Obama plans Reaganesqe speech" talk appears to be a function of commentators extrapolating from that one sentence. There's really not much there.

On a side note, if I may briefly hearken back to discussions we had in April and May, it appears we're finally getting a clear sense of what "residual forces" means.

Sorry I've been MIA of late; I was just burned out of talking about politics after the election, and I recently became a father, which has sucked more of my free time away. Rest assured that if the urge to blog about politics returns, and it probably will, I'll be back here.

[Deb]

Adam!

So nice to hear from you -- and congratulations, dad!