Obama Echoes Carter Speech: America’s Soft

Many people have compared the Barack Obama Presidency to that of President Jimmy Carter over the past few years; Obama has now made a statement that seems to echo Carter.

Obama said to a Florida television station, “This is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.”

Obama’s solution to American “softness” is to “get back on track” by passing his $447 billion jobs bill immediately. While he was critical in his speech, the President did compliment America’s youths and said that the country will recover from economic troubles with the help of education and innovative thinking with the help of the government.

According to The Daily Caller, Obama’s speech echoes the sentiment of a Carter speech given in July 1979 that declared, “…in a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” The speech, though never including the term, became known by many Americans as the “malaise speech.” Carter’s solution to “get back on track” during a time when the country was plagued by rising energy costs and massive inflation was to find a solution to the energy crises through new sources of fuel.