Will we hear Obama in retrospect?

Greg Sargent very sensibly notes that Obama, in his speech at Georgetown today announcing executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, "recast the call for climate action as the centrist, common-sense solution." Further developing that idea, he cites Chait:

As Jonathan Chait noted recently, the untold story of the Obama era is his vision of achieving liberal goals as a means for also achieving long-term economic growth:

Fashioning a long-term growth strategy is, and has always been, Obama’s deepest passion. He’s been caught up in an economic crisis and a culture war over the role of government that he wants badly to escape.

I must add that if Obama's vision of enacting liberal policies as a means for achieving long-term growth has been left untold by certain parties, those parties don't include Obama. He has never stopped telling that story: it is the very heart and soul of his pitch to America and always has been. That goes for casting those policies as "common-sense centrism," too. Throughout the 2008 campaign, tracking his speeches, I referred repeatedly to Obama's bid to move the center left. The argument has (and had) these components:

Meet the new Obama -- same (mostly) as the Old Obama

Yesterday, I sought to demonstrate that Obama was simply reverting to form in his second inaugural address by equating liberal priorities with the nation's founding principles and historical development. He did so day in and day out in 2008; the notion that liberal policy prescriptions would enable the country to continue forming "a more perfect union" was the basis of his campaign. I professed myself astonished that anyone would be surprised by his using this framework -- grounding his policies in the Declaration of Independence -- in his Second Inaugural.

Lest anyone conclude that Obama the defender of liberal priorities went into remission for four years, let's extend the 'rhetoric retrospective' back from the most recent past. Take, for example, Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention last September -- a widely panned speech that to my ear was more forceful, more caustic, and more conceptually resonant than yesterday's inaugural.  At the DNC, Obama grounded his defense of government action to expand opportunity and strengthen the safety net and stimulate enterprise in -- you guessed it -- the Declaration of Independence:

As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights – rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility and we celebrate individual initiative. We’re not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system – the greatest engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations....

Attention, Tomasky: Obama always links prosperity to fairness

Michael Tomasky warns that there's a missing link in Obama's newfound populism: while he is talking to the American people about fairness, Republicans keep talking (misleadingly) about growth.  Democrats need to win the argument about growth, because growth means jobs. And that means arguing explicitly that their policies will lead not just to shared prosperity, but to more prosperity:

What Obama needs to do more forcefully is make the next step of the argument by answering the questions: Why must fairness be restored? What will it lead to? To liberals, it’s enough that it will lead to a fairer society. Therefore, it doesn’t even occur to many liberals that the “What will it lead to?” question even needs to be answered. A fairer society is enough. But for many Americans, it’s not enough. A fairer society is fine, they think, if we can afford it. But what these Americans want is a society where there are lots of good jobs. A prosperous society. So what Obama and his speechwriters should be hoping people summarizing his speeches would say is something like: he’s for building up the middle class and making the rich pay more because things are out of whack and unfair, and because doing so will create a more prosperous society. That’s the missing piece.

I'm afraid that the missing piece is a chimera. Democrats cannot get it out of their heads that Obama just is not saying the right things. Perhaps he and his administration don't drive them home with the right sound bytes or repetitiveness -- or perhaps a populace just will not hear when unemployment is north of 8%.  Perhaps, too, Obama went semi-mute for a few months in 2011 (May to September at most) on the broad economic themes he's been repeating throughout his career on the national stage. But as long as I've been listening to the man (and reading his books and speeches), Obama has insisted that fairness and prosperity are hand-in-glove -- and that prosperity that is not broadly shared, that accrues mainly to a wealthy minority, has repeatedly (1890s, 1920s, noughties) proved unsustainable.

Two speeches at Osawatomie

Very interesting that for his landmark speech yesterday spotlighting middle class stagnation and growing income inequality as "the defining issue of our time," Obama chose to channel Teddy Roosevelt. He delivered the hour-long speech in Osawatomie, Kansas*, where in 1910 T.R. laid down a long manifesto calling for a "new nationalism" that would empower the federal government to effectively regulate powerful business interests and so deliver a "square deal" that would "deliver a more substantial equality of opportunity." Obama cited Roosevelt at length, drawing an extended parallel between T.R.'s fight to break up monopolies and establish fair labor laws and a progressive tax code and his own quest to re-establish effective regulation and more taxes on the wealthy. E. J. Dionne does a nice job today exploring the relevance of T.R.'s agenda to our own time.

Primed by Dionne, I took a look at T.R.'s speech yesterday evening. One thing leapt out at me: Roosevelt, unlike Obama, was a fighter, bred in the bone. His speech in many ways casts the fight against the entrenched privilege of special interests as a moral equivalent of war, as William James famously called for in struggles to better the human condition. T.R. was James' pupil.  But he was less willing than James to abjure war itself as the crucible of character. While James, according to one scholar, "championed the rigor and strenuousness of his rough-riding former pupil Theodore Roosevelt," ... "he also slammed Roosevelt for his ''gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves.'' In the Osawatomie speech, Roosevelt addressed himself throughout to listening Civil War veterans, drawing parallels between their battle and the one he was joining to strengthen democracy and curb special interests.

More comprehensively than he has at any point since he took office (though not more so than in the '08 campaign), Obama yesterday directly confronted Republicans for their belief that "the market will take care of everything," for putting forward further deregulation as a panacea, for advocating trickle-down economics (he used the phrase), for blocking restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthy, for trying to strangle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in its crib.   But for better and/or worse, Obama will never conceive his political task as the sublimated war that Teddy Roosevelt saw himself in:

The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.