Visitors Now: | |
Total Visits: | |
Total Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
Earlier this year, President Obama started adding a stock line to the stump speech he gives at his endless fundraisers, recalling what he supposedly said in 2008. As he phrased it at a campaign event in Florida last month:
Now, ever since I first ran for this office, I’ve said it’s going to take more than one year or one term or maybe even one president to restore the dream that built this country.
A week later, he mangled his oft-repeated statement, reversing the subject and predicate, saying that ever since he had run for president he had said it would take that long to “restore the dream this country built.” Perhaps he was confusing his 2008 statement with his 2012 campaign theme. (That dream you have? You didn’t build that).
On the night he effectively secured the Democratic presidential nomination, he told the crowd it was a “defining moment for our nation,” a “moment that will define a generation,” a “moment when … the rise of the oceans began to slow.” Five days before the election, he said we were “five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” His nomination would make the waters recede; his election would transform America. It was all about the fierce urgency of now — not two terms or maybe two presidents.
In his inaugural address, Obama said that “everywhere we look, there is work to be done” and that what was required was “action, bold and swift.” He assured the nation that:
[W]e will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.