President Obama Meets Candidate Obama

Well that was long. 70 minutes in fact. And, as the genre demands, there was a considerable gap between Presidential rhetoric and anything that is actually likely to happen. Do you really believe, now that Obama has promised this, that American exports will double in five years? Of course not.

Ezra Klein has a useful summary of the laundry list of promises here and the full text is here. Some of those pledges – the call for new nuclear power stations and for more off-shore oil exploration – were co-opted from the Republican playbook but that doesn’t make them any more likely to happen. Nor, despite a reference to doing so, will this Congress really push for trade liberalisation. And, of course, there was the usual bashing of lobbyists and foreigners that we’ve also come to expect on these occasions.

Others were simply bitterly ironic. For instance, his declaration that when it comes to education, “In this country, the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than their potential” sits poorly alongside his administration’s role in killing DC’s tiny, but popular, school voucher programme.