Aside from the commitment to what sounds like a great progressive stimulus plan, one sentence struck me: Will your job or your husband’s job or your daughter’s job be the next one cut?.
Read that closely.
In a speech about universal fears and hardship, he is addressing his primary listeners as women. Never have I heard sentence construction like that from a president -- women addressed directly in a non-"women's issues" setting as legitimate, fully fledged and very concerned and invested breadwinners. The effect is stunning.
On the one hand, it means nothing. It's just rhetoric. On the other hand, it means everything since it isn't something he needed to do. But, it shifts the ground for future Presidents by doing it. Wow.
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2 comments:
Wow indeed. Welcome to a brave new world.
Just wanted to add a little more to my comment of the other day...
I would contest the suggestion that rhetoric can ever "mean nothing." What you appear to be pointing to is the notion that language is not entirely transparent and that it can obfuscate as much as reveal. That's certainly true. But that's not the same as saying that it can be devoid of signifiers. Even "empty rhetoric" reveals something, even if that something is not what it purports on its surface to reveal.
What's revolutionary about Obama's formulation here is that it chooses a female subject for its hypothetical narrative. The default subject of western culture is male, and the female conventionally operates as an object, not a subject. When she is a subject, as the Daily Kos comments suggest, it is in discourses that figure her within a circumscribed role that is gendered female--i.e., mother, wife, female laborer, etc. Obama is implicitly interrogating the notion that the default subject position for all other discourses is male. *That* is something.
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