Hard choices

President Obama made it clear that America's financial and economic woes are not just the fault of a greedy few in Wall Street.

The Guardian

Mr Obama made clear, in his hugely anticipated inaugural address, that this moment in Washington marked the death and burial not just of the George Bush presidency, but also of the neoconservative approach to foreign policy, the hands-off-the-markets approach to the economy and to what Mr Obama called the era of "petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas" in public life which underpinned the past eight years. In 1981, from the same platform, Ronald Reagan had announced the end of the New Deal era of big government initiated by Franklin Roosevelt nearly half a century before. Now, 28 years after Reagan, Mr Obama read the last ritesover the conservative politics that have set the agenda for the western world for as long as many people can remember.

The drawing of the line with the Bush era in domestic policy was explicit and uncompromising. On the economy, Mr Obama made clear that America's financial and economic woes are not just the fault of a greedy few in Wall Street or in America's boardrooms. There was also a "collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age", a sharp political dig at the laissez-faire economic doctrines of the Democratic party in recent decades. What was needed was a new age of responsibility — a phrase that has come rather easily to the lips of centre-left politicians over the last 20 years, but one which now has an unambiguously economic and environmentalist meaning that it rarely carried when Bill Clinton used it. …

The work of doing things differently now begins. ... [T]he whole world will be watching and hoping.