Not Again: A New Foundation Revisited
Walter Shapiro
Senior Correspondent
Posted:
05/5/09
"We will act, not only to create jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth."–Barack Obama, Inaugural Address
"We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity."
–Barack Obama, April 14
"We must lay a New Foundation for growth – a foundation that will strength our economy and help us compete in the 21st century."
–Barack Obama, April 29th
Long ago, in a different century and galaxy, I proudly served the nation as a (warning: anti-climax ahead) second-tier speechwriter in the Carter administration. My historic role was sufficiently minor that if I had written a thin memoir of my White House tenure, it would have been entitled, "I Was There Too. Really I Was." In fact, like many junior aides in government, the closest I came to shaping history was to be in the room -- third door on the left along the corridors of power -- when someone else made an epic decision.
Yes, I was Zelig and Forrest Gump rolled into one. For I was present at the creation when Carter speechwriter Rick Hertzberg (now a New Yorker writer) hit upon that amazingly resilient presidential phrase, "the New Foundation."
In my mind's eye (though my vision has been greatly aided by Robert Schlesinger's evocative history of presidential speechwriters, "White House Ghosts"), I can see five of us sprawled on couches in the chief speechwriters' office in late 1978, struggling to come up with a slogan to define the troubled Carter years. How does a Democratic president sum up unemployment, inflation, the energy crisis, a restive Congress and good intentions in just two words?
The first word was easy thanks to FDR and JFK. But what came after "New"? The New Shuffle? The New Horizon? The New Vision? The New Agenda? The New Building Blocks? Then inspiration hit. As a result, Jimmy Carter dramatically began 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 prosperous world."
As a presidential mantra, the New Foundation had the shortest life span in White House history. Three days after the speech, Carter was asked about the signature phrase during a press conference. "I doubt it will survive," Carter said in a pointed rebuke to his speechwriters. "We are not trying to establish this as a permanent slogan."
That should have left the New Foundation metaphor as dead as the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons that Jerry Ford tried to popularize as an antidote to high prices. But just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is," presidential speechwriters (and presidents who are speechwriters) ransack the same attic filled with the rhetorical fragments of yesteryear in the quest for grand imagery. As William Safire points out in "Safire's New Political Dictionary," David Lloyd George ran for reelection as British prime minister in 1919 on the slogan, "A New Deal for Everyone."
Obama -- who was still in high school when the first concrete blocks of the New Foundation were being added to Carter's rhetoric -- has embraced the economy-under-construction imagery with an enthusiasm that eluded his predecessor. The metaphor was the centerpiece of Obama's April 14 Georgetown University speech on the economy as he repeated the phrase six separate times.
It is telling, though, that Carter, the first president to talk about being "born again," discussed the New Foundation entirely in a secular context. But Obama, perhaps reflecting a more religious era, invoked the "Sermon on the Mount" to underscore the difference between a house erected on sand and a house "founded on a rock."
Only hyper-partisan Republicans are likely to belabor the similarities between Obama and Carter. But it is intriguing that both the 39th and 44th presidents have employed "the New Foundation" rhetoric to make their far-reaching economic agendas (Carter presided over the largest public service jobs program since the New Deal) appear rooted in the rich soil of the American political tradition. The New Foundation suggests do-it-yourself home repairs rather than the mad-architect grandiosity of, say, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
In Obama's case, the need for a new foundation hints at the politically useful conceit that the fledgling president is being forced to rebuild from the ground up because he was sold a bill of goods by his predecessor (that Bush fellow), who never mentioned the termites or the dry rot.
To my ears, the New Foundation sounds clunky, mechanistic and devoid of poetry. At a time of epic economic change -- during perhaps the most fateful year for White House domestic policymakers since 1933 -- Barack Obama is brandishing an image that suggests an Isaac Asimov science fiction novel, an advertisement for body-shaping under garments for women and burly construction workers digging a deep hole.
I am, at least, being consistent in scorning the New Foundation as presidential rhetoric. More than 30 years ago, when I heard the slogan for the first time at the White House, I said in my lone contribution to history, "Can't we do better?"