Today President Obama gave a speech outlining long-term plans for economic recovery, titled “A New Foundation“:
We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.
I knew I had heard “New Foundation” somewhere before, and sure enough, a Google search shows that Jimmy Carter used the same slogan in his 1979 State of the Union address:
Tonight I want to examine in a broad sense the state of our American Union–how we are building a new foundation for a peaceful and a prosperous world…The challenge to us is to build a new and firmer foundation for the future–for a sound economy, for a more effective government, for more political trust, and for a stable peace–so that the America our children inherit will be even stronger and even better than it is today.
Of course, 30 years have passed and Carter is an elder statesman. But is the 1979-vintage Carter administration – an era of stagflation at home and humiliation at the hands of Iran abroad – really something Obama wants any association with? Or, to put it bluntly, don’t his speechwriters routinely do a Google search on their slogan-of-the-week? (Alternatively, perhaps they were trying to evoke Asimov’s “Foundation” books, in which wise seers build new institutions to succeed the eroding galactic empire, preventing the total collapse of civilization.)
