President Obama at Notre Dame

. . . .

Every one of you should be proud of what you have achieved at this institution. One hundred and sixty-three classes of Notre Dame graduates have sat where you sit today. Some were here during years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare — periods of relative peace and prosperity that required little by way of sacrifice or struggle.

You, however, are not getting off that easy. You have a different deal. Your class has come of age at a moment of great consequence for our nation and for the world — a rare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age. It's a privilege and a responsibility afforded to few generations — and a task that youre now called to fulfill.

This generation, your generation is the one that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to a global economy that left millions behind even before the most recent crisis hit — an economy where greed and short-term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day's work.

Your generation must decide how to save God's creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it. Your generation must seek peace at a time when there are those who will stop at nothing to do us harm, and when weapons in the hands of a few can destroy the many. And we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity — diversity of thought, diversity of culture, and diversity of belief.

In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family.

. . . .

The question, then — the question then is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without, as Father John said, demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?

And of course, nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion.

As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called "The Audacity of Hope." A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the Illinois primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life — but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my Web site — an entry that said I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor said he had assumed I was a reasonable person, he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words." Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor's letter, I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn't change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my Web site. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that — when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

. . . .

Read the whole speech here.

Obama politically maneuvers on the question of socialism

[T]oday I'm announcing that my administration will offer GM and Chrysler a limited additional period of time to work with creditors, unions, and other stakeholders to fundamentally restructure in a way that would justify an investment of additional taxpayer dollars. During this period they must produce plans that would give the American people confidence in their long-term prospects for success.

Now, what we're asking for is difficult. It will require hard choices by companies. It will require unions and workers who have already made extraordinarily painful concessions to do more. It'll require creditors to recognize that they can't hold out for the prospect of endless government bailouts.

That last sentence got me. "The prospect of endless government bailouts"? President Obama knows endless government bailouts of large-scale organizations have been the US government's plan for over a year now, with one big exception (Lehman) that proved the rule. Furthermore, a government-led bailout should be the plan. To me, the way for America to have a weak recovery out of this recession, relative to the rest of the world, is to destroy our credit-worthiness by reneging on all our debt. The credibility of our economic power is on the line. Our private organizations are so over-leveraged and un-productive that they can't get themselves out of debt. It's up to the government to fund and re-structure them. The question will be, what will the government create out of all this responsibility?

Anyway, I like it better when political leaders square with the public and make the case on its merits. Especially in this case, when the argument for government responsibility is so compelling. I understand his reticence. The general belief that 'government intervention is bad' has appeared to exist for decades now, and may still hold sway. But maybe not. Nobody knows. Conditions have changed. But there is uncertainty about the general beliefs, so the President plays it safe. My hunch though? He's playing it too safe. He has the credibility right now to take over institutions and create them anew. Does he recognize this? Does he have the confidence he can successfully walk the country through that door?

Read all of the President's remarks on the auto companies here.

Another word on Paul Krugman

Earlier I wrote a post and was kinda hard on Paul Krugman, saying his columns and blog posts are at heart political rather than scholarly exercises. I hold to that.

But I'll say, I do admire Mr. Krugman's ability to make forceful arguments extrapolating from data. Even when I disagree with him, and even if his arguments often appear to have mainly political ends, I must say he is as good as there is at articulating economic data in an interesting, useful, accessible way.

An example, from his column of today:

President Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy was “massive,” “giant,” “enormous.” So the American people were told, especially by TV news, during the run-up to the stimulus vote. Watching the news, you might have thought that the only question was whether the plan was too big, too ambitious.

Yet many economists, myself included, actually argued that the plan was too small and too cautious. The latest data confirm those worries — and suggest that the Obama administration’s economic policies are already falling behind the curve.

To see how bad the numbers are, consider this: The administration’s budget proposals, released less than two weeks ago, assumed an average unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for the whole of this year. In reality, unemployment hit that level in February — and it’s rising fast.

On one hand this argument is weak -- even in its entirety, it falls short of adequately acknowledging the political and cultural realities of the moment. It wasn't easy for Obama to get the stimulus he did. There are a lot of powerful headwinds against massive government spending of the sort that Obama just pushed through. More money for national defense? Easy. Demand-side redistribution of wealth through institutions of health, energy, and education? Not so easy.

But on the other hand, Mr. Krugman has a point -- as large as the stimulus was it might not fully meet the challenge of the contraction, at least not as soon as we might like. And he finds a perfect data-point to show it: The 8.1 percent unemployment that was supposed by the Obama administration to be the year's average is going to be passed by the end of March. This fact helps make the argument for much, much more stimulus somewhat compelling.

Obama and Krugman are interesting rivals. They seem to have an on-going debate that I will try to document.

A very public president: Obama on what he reads, with a comment on Paul Krug . . . er, blogs

From the 35-minute interview he gave to the NY Times, here:

Q: Sir, we’re landing here, but what are you reading these days? What kind of newspapers do you read, do you read the clips, do you read actual papers, do you watch television?

A: Other than The New York Times?

Q: Other than The New York Times. Do you read Web sites? What Web sites do you look at?

A: I read most of the big national papers.

Q. Do you read them in clips or do you read them in the paper?

A. No, I read the paper. I like the feel of a newspaper. I read most of the weekly newsmagazines. I may not read them from cover to cover but I’ll thumb through them. You know, I spend most of my time these days reading a lot of briefings.

Q: And television? Do you watch? Web sites?

A: I don’t watch much television, I confess.

Q: And Web sites?

Q: No blogs?

A: I rarely read blogs.

. . .

. . . part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other. The truth is this is a very complex set of problems and bad decisions can result in huge taxpayer expenditures and poor results.

Let me speculate that Obama's extended comment on blogs could be intended for the Times columnist and Princeton economist, Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman is a very powerful voice on the 'left.' But his widely read column and blog could be seen as somewhat flawed analytical exercises, from the perspective Obama is coming from. In his column and his blog, Mr. Krugman seems preoccupied with arguing for bank nationalization as a theory rather than laying out the complexities. He does not provide what readers need: a discussion of what the unintended consequences of all the alternatives could be, in the conditions as they exist today.

Don't get me wrong, Mr. Krugman is a great writer, and a forceful arguer. My final sense of his columns and blog, however, is that in these two public spaces he is more movement man than scholar.

Anyway, on a last note, the President's reading habits are another example of Obama's close relationship with the American public sphere. He is a product of it, and he stays in touch with it through to today.