Obama's Wrong - We Don't a New Foundation, We Need the Old One Back

The President’s New Foundation phrasing should emphasize a return to, or a strengthening of, old foundations rather than creating new ones.

In Washington we parse words for sport. And when that gets dull, we parse the parsing. Such will be the nature of this post.

President Obama has apparently adopted a New Foundation as his touchstone phrase. The New York Times frets that it might not catch on because there are too many syllables, or because it’s too vague. I share those concerns, but my primary parsing concern is not with “foundation,” but rather with “new.”

Scholars of all stripes have long recognized the power of “returning.” After facing years of tribulations at sea, Homer went home. Many American revolutionaries complained that the King had abandoned English ideals and that the colonies needed to declare independence to return to those ideals. George Carlin talked about baseball focusing on “being safe at home” and Ronald Reagan said it was morning again in America.

Some of the most powerful American political rhetoric calls for a returning – to roots, to values, to strengths, to ideals, and so forth. (It is an easy step from here to notions of civil religion, the “shining city on the hill” and the search for Eden).

As such, rather than call for a new foundation, President Obama would do well to call for a return to our foundation. A new economy built on a foundation of trust, honor and hard work – the foundations on which America was built – would have more rhetorical force than a call for a new foundation for a new economy.

A call for the new implies the old is flawed. A bad foundation is a dire thing, it means that the house we built and in which we live is at risk, it’s almost an assertion of a national existential crisis. But Americans like the old, especially the mythologized, idealized old of Main Street Disneyland (and President Reagan’s commercials). Don’t tell us the old is bad and needs to be discarded for the new, tell us the last new thing we got was a mistake because it veered from the old. The problem isn’t the old, it’s the most recent new – unregulated financial markets, complex speculative deals that rewarded cleverness and trickery rather than work and honesty.

For Americans, the old is good (that’s why marketers sell “Olde Fashioned Lemon Aide” and singers croon old fashioned love songs). President Obama should remind us that our old foundation is strong and good, and that we need to build on it anew.