WASHINGTON  – President Barack Obama gave America the audacity to hope again.
  
After describing the U.S. economy in the grimmest of terms for weeks, pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan through Congress, the president used his address to Congress on Tuesday night to tap the deep well of American optimism – the never-say-die national spirit that every president tries to capture in words. And great presidents embody.

“We will rebuild. We will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before,” Obama said, echoing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

“The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach,” Obama said. “What is required now for this country is to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.”

The themes of responsibility, accountability and, above all, national community rang throughout an address carefully balanced by the gravity of its times. Job losses. Home foreclosures. Credit crisis. Rising health care costs. Declining trust in government.

“The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere,” Obama said.

It seemed that Obama might be sticking to the dour talking points of the stimulus debate, when he warned that failure to pass the legislation would lead to a catastrophe “as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression,” one that “we may be unable to reverse.”

Fearing (and hearing) the worst, Americans supported Obama’s package and lawmakers passed it. But his rhetoric carried a risk.      

None other than former President Bill Clinton, husband of Obama’s former rival and now Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, complained that the president’s words were too much of a downer. The president from Hope, Ark., told the author of “The Audacity of Hope” to get back on message.

“I just want the American people to know that he’s confident that we are going to get out of this and he feels good about the long run,” Clinton told ABC’s “Good Morning America” last Friday.

Obama didn’t need Clinton’s advice. While his advisers privately criticized Clinton for second-guessing their strategy, Obama said a president must be both a realist and a cheerleader. “I’m constantly trying to thread the needle between sounding alarmist but also letting the American people know the circumstances that we’re in,” Obama told ABC on Saturday.

Indeed, advisers said at the time that Obama had already written much of his address, and they predicted that it would mark a rhetorical pivot – from selling fear to raising hopes.

And that he did.

“You should also know,” Obama told millions of viewers Tuesday night, “that the money you’ve deposited in banks across the country is safe; your insurance is secure; and you can rely on the continued operation of our financial system.”
  
He sounded like Roosevelt who, after closing banks briefly in the first days of his presidency, stoked the embers of American optimism. “Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan,” Roosevelt said. “Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system. It is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”

Like Roosevelt, Obama asked Americans to unite against fear.

“We are a nation that has seen promise amid peril, and claimed opportunity from ordeal,” Obama said. “Now we must be that nation again.”

Like Roosevelt, Obama said his government had already provided the machinery to create jobs, improve access to health care, free up credit and help struggling homeowners.

And, like Roosevelt, he challenged Americans to help fix the nation’s woes. Obama even challenged his fellow citizens to recognize their role in creating the problem. “People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford,” Obama said, “from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway.”

He was blunt but bullish on America.

“None of this will come without cost, nor will it be easy,” he said after spelling out his agenda. “But this is America. We don’t do what’s easy. We do what is necessary to move this country forward.”

In short, he reminded people that America has always seen itself as a “shining city upon a hill,” as one of its earliest leaders, John Winthrop, put it – a metaphor that Ronald Reagan reintroduced effectively in the 1980s.
 
When he addressed Congress, Reagan liked to pepper the audience with average people who did extraordinary things. People who epitomized the American spirit and underscored his message. Obama borrowed that device, inviting Ty’Sheoma Bethea to join first lady Michelle Obama in the crowd.

Bethea is an eighth-grade student who wrote Congress for help in repairing her dilapidated school, telling lawmakers that she and her fellow students will rise above their conditions because, “We are not quitters.”

And that was Obama’s bottom-line message to a shaken nation. We are not quitters.

Republican L. Scott Lingamfelter, who represents the 31st District (Prince William and Fauquier) was elected to the House of Delegates in 2001.

WOODBRIDGE –  Sometimes politics can be parsed too much. Yet there is no end to the complex, pseudo-intellectual explanations by the liberal media for President-elect Barack H. Obama’s victory. They are besotted with joy and very satisfied with their role in boosting Obama’s electoral fortunes almost as much as their efforts to belittle and ridicule President George W. Bush, a man who has kept America safe from terror attacks for seven years. But I digress.

All of us — the liberal media in particular — should pause a moment and consider Occam’s Razor, a principle of logic developed by a 14th-century English Franciscan monk, William of Ockham. In short, Occam’s Razor asserts that all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. Put another way, the simplest explanation is the most likely one. So it is in this election.

We had a Republican president with one of the lowest approval ratings since Democrat Harry S. Truman left office in 1952. The economy tanked in October. Our Republican brand was devastated by congressional Republicans who spent like drunken sailors. And our chief opponent, Barack Obama, is the most gifted political preacher in recent memory. Simply put, Republicans abandoned conservative principles; Democrats started talking about them — and they won.

Consider the evidence.

First, under a Republican-controlled Congress, spending bourgeoned and government exploded. Programs like No Child Left Behind and the Prescription Medicare program added to the debt already strained by the war on terror (a war we did not begin, but must pursue and finish honorably).

Second, we nominated a presidential candidate who, while representing the highest traditions of patriotism, frequently sided with liberal Democrats. John McCain was the author of the McCain-Feingold bill that ties the hands of political parties engaging in free speech, a law that ironically contributed to McCain’s defeat by compelling him to rely on public financing while Obama, who pledged to take public money, went private in a big way and was awash in cash.

MCCAIN WAS at the center of the disastrous immigration reform bill that provoked a huge opposition by grassroots Republicans and conservative Democrats alike, a group once known as the “Reagan Coalition.” And his support for the infamous October bailout disappointed fiscal hawks. While an undisputed war hero, McCain was not distinguished as a conservative.

Third, recent polls suggest that up to 20 percent of the people who voted for Obama were self-identified “conservatives.” Other polling shows that despite all the empty platitudes about “change” and “hope,” America remains a center-right nation that lost confidence in national Republicans to govern conservatively.
In their place, Americans chose Obama, who spoke of tax cuts and spending reform, while avoiding any inflammatory rhetoric that would “scare” conservatives fed up with “Republicrats” and willing to take a chance with someone who  at least was talking about things important to them.

Obama’s almost fatal slip came following his comment to “Joe the Plumber” about “spreading the wealth around.” Even that gaffe wasn’t enough to make voters — frustrated with national Republican shortcomings — rethink their vote for a freshman senator with only four years of federal service.

IN SUM, when national Republicans walked away from the Reagan agenda and its underlying principles, the Reagan coalition walked away from them.

If there is a silver lining in all of this for Republicans, it’s that Obama vastly over-promised what he can deliver. He will find this out soon when his Democratic House and Senate “friends” take a moment to read the budget balance sheet and add to it the $800 billion bailout they just passed (not to mention one in the wings for the auto industry). Moreover, when Obama finishes reading the classified briefs, he will discover that pulling out of Iraq, working with the Pakistanis, and being harmonious with so-called European “allies” may be more difficult than previously advertised.

The result? Supporters who were mesmerized by Obama’s vacuous promises of hope, change, and “I’ll get you there!” will be very disappointed when they realize that the “there” Obama pointed to looks more like the “here and now,” which doesn’t comport to the “Otopia” he framed between well-situated teleprompters.

That said, we Republicans would be wise not to depend on Obama’s failures. People want leadership, not sideline sniping. They want a positive, can-do style of governance that looks for real solutions leading to lower taxes, more freedom, and greater opportunity. They are fed up, angry, and want a better place to raise a family, grow a business, and provide for a stable future. The nanny-state, big-government, high-tax solutions Democrats gravitate to will not answer their concerns. Reagan principles will. The question is will Republicans step up to answer the call?

Seems simple to me, but I wonder if William of Occam and the Gipper would agree.