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What I want to do is just share a little bit of perspective from the Oval Office in terms of what I’ve seen over the last two years.
The reason this is a difficult time politically is because the country has gone through a very difficult time generally.
This is the worst crisis we’ve seen since the Great Depression, since most of our lifetimes.
I mean, I'll be 50 next year, so I came of age, entered into college just as Ronald Reagan came to power during the last recession that was anything approaching what we’ve gone through.
We had then another recession at the beginning of the ‘90s, another recession at the beginning of 2000-2001.
If you combine those previous three recessions, the magnitude and impact they’ve had is less than what we’ve had just in this one recession.
I mean, that gives you some scope, some scale.
We had lost 4 million jobs in the six months prior to me taking office, and then another 750,000 the month I sworn in, and 600,000 several months subsequent to that.
So, all told, we’ve lost 8 million jobs during the course of this recession.
But, that doesn’t begin to measure, I think, the full impact of what people have experienced, the fear of suddenly seeing their 401(k)s plummet by 40 percent, the uncertainty of having your home values drop so that suddenly your mortgage is higher than the value of your home, the people who didn’t lose their jobs but now are uncertain as to whether those jobs will still be there.
And this is all on top of what had been essentially what the Wall Street Journal, not just Democrats, called “the lost decade”, a decade in which, from 2001 to 2009, the average middle-class family actually lost 5 percent of their income.
We had the most sluggish job growth since we had since World War II.
In fact, the job growth we’ve had over the last year was at a faster clip than we had between 2001 and 2009.
So, families were already struggling before the crisis hit, and obviously once the crisis hit, it unsettled the entire country and the entire world in ways that we had not seen for a very, very long time.
Now, I say that to first of all remind us of how far we’ve come over the last 20 months.
An economy that was contracting is now growing.
We’ve had nine consecutive months of private sector job growth.
The financial sector is stable, and so in some ways what is remarkable is how despite this body blow that the country took, the country once again has proven more resilient and more adaptable and more dynamic than I think a lot of folks give us credit for.
But it’s also to remind you that we’ve got so much more work to do.
People out there are still hurting very badly, and they are still scared, and so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.
Our job, then, is to make sure that even as we make progress, that we are also giving people a sense of hope and a vision for the future, a sense that we will get through these tough times, and the country will come out stronger for it, having gone through this trauma.
That’s why this election is so absolutely critical, because essentially you can respond in a couple of ways to a trauma like this.
I mean, one is to pull back, retrench, respond to your fears by pushing away challenges, looking backwards, and another is to say we can meet these challenges and we are going to move forward, and that’s what this election is about.
The reason this is a difficult time politically is because the country has gone through a very difficult time generally.
This is the worst crisis we’ve seen since the Great Depression, since most of our lifetimes.
I mean, I'll be 50 next year, so I came of age, entered into college just as Ronald Reagan came to power during the last recession that was anything approaching what we’ve gone through.
We had then another recession at the beginning of the ‘90s, another recession at the beginning of 2000-2001.
If you combine those previous three recessions, the magnitude and impact they’ve had is less than what we’ve had just in this one recession.
I mean, that gives you some scope, some scale.
We had lost 4 million jobs in the six months prior to me taking office, and then another 750,000 the month I sworn in, and 600,000 several months subsequent to that.
So, all told, we’ve lost 8 million jobs during the course of this recession.
But, that doesn’t begin to measure, I think, the full impact of what people have experienced, the fear of suddenly seeing their 401(k)s plummet by 40 percent, the uncertainty of having your home values drop so that suddenly your mortgage is higher than the value of your home, the people who didn’t lose their jobs but now are uncertain as to whether those jobs will still be there.
And this is all on top of what had been essentially what the Wall Street Journal, not just Democrats, called “the lost decade”, a decade in which, from 2001 to 2009, the average middle-class family actually lost 5 percent of their income.
We had the most sluggish job growth since we had since World War II.
In fact, the job growth we’ve had over the last year was at a faster clip than we had between 2001 and 2009.
So, families were already struggling before the crisis hit, and obviously once the crisis hit, it unsettled the entire country and the entire world in ways that we had not seen for a very, very long time.
Now, I say that to first of all remind us of how far we’ve come over the last 20 months.
An economy that was contracting is now growing.
We’ve had nine consecutive months of private sector job growth.
The financial sector is stable, and so in some ways what is remarkable is how despite this body blow that the country took, the country once again has proven more resilient and more adaptable and more dynamic than I think a lot of folks give us credit for.
But it’s also to remind you that we’ve got so much more work to do.
People out there are still hurting very badly, and they are still scared, and so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.
Our job, then, is to make sure that even as we make progress, that we are also giving people a sense of hope and a vision for the future, a sense that we will get through these tough times, and the country will come out stronger for it, having gone through this trauma.
That’s why this election is so absolutely critical, because essentially you can respond in a couple of ways to a trauma like this.
I mean, one is to pull back, retrench, respond to your fears by pushing away challenges, looking backwards, and another is to say we can meet these challenges and we are going to move forward, and that’s what this election is about.