Le Monde's editorialist highlights Barack Obama's move to action, as he promised worried Americans reform and rigor, assuring them that their country would emerge stronger from its worst economic crisis in decades. (Photo: Getty Images)
Hope versus the crisis, the crisis versus hope. Such were the two terms of the equation Barack Obama had to solve Tuesday, February 24, during his first overall policy speech before a joint session of Congress. Five weeks after his inauguration and still strong with the support of over two-thirds of Americans, the president of the United States met that challenge as he recaptured the most inspired timbres of his electoral campaign.
The crisis? He didn't whitewash its scale: "Our economy is weakened and our confidence shaken. The impact of this recession is real and it is everywhere. We are living through difficult and uncertain times." He did not sidestep the brutal facts of employment collapse, of the devastated real estate market or the credit crisis. Nor did he attempt to gloss over the sacrifices that will be necessary to arrest this crisis: everything demonstrates that the colossal sums of public money already injected into the economy in general, and the banking and automobile industries in particular, have not yet restored confidence - either on Wall Street or in the heartlands.
However, the president was careful not to reiterate the very alarmist forecasts that he had brandished two weeks ago to convince Congress to vote for his economic recovery plan. Too much pessimism, he clear-sightedly recognized, threatens all possibility of restoring confidence to his fellow citizens. So he applied himself to communicating a message of hope: "We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," he pronounced, reviving the accents of Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression.
But this hope will not operate without courage, he warned. To restructure "long-term prosperity," to retake control of the future, requires not only emergency measures, but also medium- and long-term structural policies to reduce the country's debt by half, to revive industry, to seriously regulate the financial sector, to regenerate education and to restructure the health care system.
So the "day of reckoning has arrived," according to Obama. No one could have said it better. The moment to go from "vision" to its implementation and the first budget (to be presented Thursday, February 26); to go from the electoral campaign's "Yes we can" to the action of "Yes, we will." To forestall the more oppositional "Yes, he must" that could confront him tomorrow.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.'
Hope versus the crisis, the crisis versus hope. Such were the two terms of the equation Barack Obama had to solve Tuesday, February 24, during his first overall policy speech before a joint session of Congress. Five weeks after his inauguration and still strong with the support of over two-thirds of Americans, the president of the United States met that challenge as he recaptured the most inspired timbres of his electoral campaign.
The crisis? He didn't whitewash its scale: "Our economy is weakened and our confidence shaken. The impact of this recession is real and it is everywhere. We are living through difficult and uncertain times." He did not sidestep the brutal facts of employment collapse, of the devastated real estate market or the credit crisis. Nor did he attempt to gloss over the sacrifices that will be necessary to arrest this crisis: everything demonstrates that the colossal sums of public money already injected into the economy in general, and the banking and automobile industries in particular, have not yet restored confidence - either on Wall Street or in the heartlands.
However, the president was careful not to reiterate the very alarmist forecasts that he had brandished two weeks ago to convince Congress to vote for his economic recovery plan. Too much pessimism, he clear-sightedly recognized, threatens all possibility of restoring confidence to his fellow citizens. So he applied himself to communicating a message of hope: "We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," he pronounced, reviving the accents of Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression.
But this hope will not operate without courage, he warned. To restructure "long-term prosperity," to retake control of the future, requires not only emergency measures, but also medium- and long-term structural policies to reduce the country's debt by half, to revive industry, to seriously regulate the financial sector, to regenerate education and to restructure the health care system.
So the "day of reckoning has arrived," according to Obama. No one could have said it better. The moment to go from "vision" to its implementation and the first budget (to be presented Thursday, February 26); to go from the electoral campaign's "Yes we can" to the action of "Yes, we will." To forestall the more oppositional "Yes, he must" that could confront him tomorrow.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.'
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