A Sunday Sermon from Senator Obama

From "Testing the Waters" in The New Yorker, with audio:

Is the White House a house worth inheriting, considering the shape that this gentleman obviously thinks it’s in.

It’s a legitimate question, because I think the next President is going to have a lot of problems to clean up and not a lot of resources to work with. So whoever is elected is going to have to have a conversation with the American people about what our challenges are, what steps we can take, how long it’s going to take, and ask that they join, that they take ownership in this project. You know—I was just mentioning town-hall meetings—one of the things that invariably come up when I’m in town-hall meetings is, I’ll have ten or fifteen questions, mostly relating to “We need more money for health care,” or “Why did the prescription-drug bill have a doughnut hole in it,” or “The roads need to be built,” etc., and then somebody in the audience will say, “And when are we going to get rid of that death tax?” And it’s a terrific—I have a friend who teaches and talks about teachable moments. And it’s a great teachable moment, where you say to them, You know, I hope at some point I need to wiggle my way out of the inheritance tax, since, by 2009, seven million dollars will be exempted for a couple passing on to their kids. But, I said, completely eliminating it will cost a trillion dollars. Now, we have three options to achieve that. We can borrow a trillion dollars from China, which is what we’ve been doing; we can tax the 99.5 per cent of the population an extra trillion dollars to make up for the tax cut for the top .5 per cent; or we can cut a trillion dollars’ worth of programs. And here’s what that would involve, because we’d have to put Medicaid benefits, and Medicare benefits, and student-loan programs, and so forth. So who are we? What are our values? Is that something that’s a priority to us? And, invariably, if you have the capacity to have that conversation, people make the right choice. They say, All right. That doesn’t make sense. And maybe there’s a way we can exempt small businesses, and family farms so they can get passed on. But, no, we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t make that choice. That’s the power of the Presidency that I don’t see used enough. The capacity to explain to the American people in very prosaic, straightforward terms: here are the choices we have. The biggest problem we have in our politics, and our campaigns press this upon candidates, is to lie about the choices that have to be made. And to obfuscate and to fudge. And so by the time the person arrives there people are already set up for disappointment. And my wife—you know, I love talking to her. She takes pride in considering herself like the Everyperson—who happens to have gone to Princeton and Harvard Law School. But, to her credit, I mean, she grew up on the South Side of Chicago, working-class family, and that’s why she’s so suspicious of this hype surrounding me now, and she’s absolutely right, because she says, you know, people don’t want hard choices. Everybody’s all happy and feel-good, until you actually say to them, Well, you know what? Actually, if we have a real energy plan it’s going to cost something. There’s not a magic energy store where we can buy a new gadget; we’re going to have to invest and make some tough decisions. But I do think the American people respond better to that conversation than we give them credit for, and it’s not tried often enough.