Obama, midway '09: 'When it gets hard'

by Mark Silva

"This is when it gets hard,'' President Barack Obama says, half way through 2009, with a sweeping accounting of actions taken in little more than five months in office.

"This is when the criticism gets louder, when the pundits grow impatient, when cynicism seeks to reassert itself,'' says a president whose approval ratings - hovering in the high 60's in polls around his inauguration and slipping into the high 50's lately - have started to show the wear and tear of a daunting national political agenda.

"This is when we hear the same voices advocating the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place,'' Obama said last night at a fundraiser with his party's and his own campaign's leaders. "This is where we hear that change just isn't possible.''

Obama, with an assessment of all that he has accomplished in nearly six months - "not bad'' - added: "We can't be satisfied.''

Obama singled out some of his biggest supporters - Chicago hotel heiress and business executive Penny Pritzker, finance chairman of the Obama campaign, and Tim Kaine, outgoing governor of Virginia and sitting chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

"This was the first elected official outside of Illinois to endorse my campaign,'' Obama said of Kaine. "Now, think about this. This is in February of 2007. He is the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He stands beside me in Richmond, the seat of the old Confederacy, and says, 'I'm endorsing Barack Obama (and the audience laughed) for president of the United States...

"He hadn't been in office that long,'' Obama joked. "He didn't know any better... But Tim has just been an extraordinary friend, and he is now just doing an extraordinary job on behalf of the DNC.

"I look at every single table,'' the president said at the party fundraiser at Washington's tony Mandarin Hotel, "and there are people here who took their families, took their grandparents, took their cousins and nephews, and went into Iowa and went to New Hampshire and campaigned and knocked on doors and insisted to skeptics that now was the time for change in America, and lo and behold we're bringing about some change in America.

"Not one month into this administration, we responded to this financial crisis with the most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation's history, a plan that has already provided tax relief to 95 percent of working families, as we had promised, a plan that's saving jobs and creating new ones in construction and clean energy and small business across the country,'' the president said.

"We passed a budget resolution that helps to cut our deficit in half while laying the foundations for all the building blocks required for a post-bubble economy: reforming our health care system, initiating a clean energy agenda, revamping our education system so that our kids can compete in the 21st Century.

"We lifted a ban on federal funding of stem cell research. We expanded the Children's Health Insurance Program to cover 11 million children in need. We passed a national service bill to create hundreds of thousands of opportunities for people to serve their communities. We passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- the first bill I signed... so that equal pay for equal work is a reality all across this country.

"That was just the beginning.

"We passed a series of reforms that won't just change policy in Washington, but changes how Washington work.

"We brought together auto executives and labor unions and environmental groups, Democrats and Republicans together to set national fuel-efficiency standards for our cars and trucks for the very first time in history. We will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil as a consequence of this agreement. We passed bipartisan legislation to help homeowners and to crack down on predatory lenders who are seeking to take advantage of them.

"We passed laws to protect consumers from unfair rate hikes and abusive fees leveled by many credit card companies; a law that will eliminate waste in our defense budget and save taxpayers billions of dollars; and after decades of opposition, we passed legislation that will prevent tobacco companies from marketing to our children.

"It's not bad for six months,'' Obama said. "So we should feel proud for what we've accomplished. But we can't be satisfied.

"We should feel confident in the future -- but not complacent. We can't be content with the present. Not when there are workers that are still worried about losing their jobs or their homes or their health care. Not when there are so many children out there who aren't getting the skills that they need to compete in the 21st century. Not when justice is still elusive for too many in our society.

"This is when it gets hard. This is when the criticism gets louder, when the pundits grow impatient, when cynicism seeks to reassert itself. This is when we hear the same voices advocating the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place. This is where we hear that change just isn't possible.

"So this is exactly the moment when we need to fight the hardest. This is going to be the time when we need to band together and when we decide we're going to do what's right for the country and deliver the change that we promised when I was elected last November.''