The House Upon a Rock Speech

A Speech Built on Sand

 
Vincent J. Curtis 


 15 April 2009

            President Barack Obama is evidently used to speaking in front of his intellectual inferiors or to friendly people who turn off their critical faculties when listening to him.  Obama speaks in clichés, offers half-baked ideas, compares things of different genera, and never offers reasons for why he thinks as he does.  Yet his audiences never seems to react, and say “huh?”  His speech to Georgetown University entitled “The House Upon a Rock” is a case in point.

            At the opening of the speech President Obama promised to speak in prose, not poetry, so we can rightly expect serious analysis, thoughtful examples, and an absence of metaphor, forgiving the metaphor in the title.

            Nevertheless, the audience was fed a diet of opaque cliches:  ‘a larger vision of America’s future,’ ‘lead the world,’ ‘the downward spiral,’ ‘clear away the wreckage,’ ‘repair the damage,’ ‘a larger collapse,’ ‘a vicious economic downturn,’ ‘no choice but to attack on all fronts,’ ‘a 21^st century financial system governed by 20^th century rules.’  And the granddaddy of environmentalist clichés: ‘it is not sustainable.’

            His audience was promised intellectual fish, and they got rhetorical stone.

And no one seems to notice his bewildering shifts of ground, so calm and impassive is this figure speaking before them.

            Obama’s half-baked ideas on the economy collapse upon the most cursory analysis.  Obama’s economic program he says is aimed at ending the economic cycle, which he calls “boom and bust,” and “unsustainable.”  He has assembled an impressive team of liberal economists to advise him.  But none of these economists, or anyone else, has published a paper explaining how economic cycles can be ended.

Since cyclic behavior has been the economic order for the last several hundred years, to call it ‘unsustainable’ is clearly wrong.   Cycles may be undesirable, but anything going on for hundreds of years ought to meet the criterion of ‘sustainable.’

            In his speech, President Obama never said what was wrong with an economic boom

 It must be the ‘bust’ he is opposed to.  But if there is to be pleasure, there must also be pain.  If one is as allergic to excitement as the cool Obama is, and there must be no more pleasure followed by pain, then it must be a neutral numbness that Obama holds as the economic ideal.

The ‘sustainable’ economy is one of a ‘steady-state,’ neither growing nor shrinking, for growth implies increasing demand for the earth’s finite resources and variations in rate of growth are what economic cycles are.

            What makes Obama’s thrust of argument so much twaddle is not the unreality of an undisturbable steady-state economy, but that he promises economic growth at the same time.

It is for the sake of being competitive in the world economy that Obama wants a national health-care system, as well as new investments and new jobs in so-called renewable energy, a better educated and better paid work force, and reductions in the national debt.  He promises new rules for Wall Street that rewards innovation as opposed to reckless risk-taking – as if a rule on paper can spot the difference, since all innovation involves risk.

            Both the magic of the man and the unreality of his proposals are found in his promises to find savings in the Federal budget that will “bring down the debt for future generations.”  After criticizing President Bush for his deficits, Obama’s plan more than doubles the deficit in fiscal 2010 to a trillion dollars, and will eventually double the US national debt.

All his plans are aimed at a ‘sustainable’ economy; that is, one that is not able to pay back debt because it is just able to sustain itself.  If debt were to be paid back, it would be due to rising tax revenues collected from a growing economy, and a growing economy is not sustainable to Obama’s reasoning.

Raising taxes to pay down debt, on the other hand, tends to depress economic activity; and since the ideal economy operates at the sustainable level, a tax increase depresses activity below the sustainable.  Hence, bringing down debt is impossible without violating the principle of a ‘sustainable’ economy; and bringing down debt is said to be necessary for a sustainable economy.

            Barack Obama is used to bewitching and bewildering his audience with quick-footed shifts of ground.  Nobody quick enough to notice seems to point it out.

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