Beyond the recession

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | 2:12 a.m.

President Barack Obama answered his critics and challenged every American on Tuesday while explaining his plan for returning the country to prosperity.

Before an audience at Georgetown University, Obama summarized how the recession began and pulled no punches.

Traditional American values were left behind as people rushed into

homeownership without incomes or savings to justify their loans. “And the reason these loans were so readily available was that Wall Street saw big profits to be made,” Obama said.

Washington, too, was irresponsible, he said, in providing almost no oversight.

He took his audience, chronologically, through how those lapses in values contributed to the global recession — an exercise that spoke to the need for a greater public sense of personal and national responsibility.

That is a fundamental requirement if Obama’s recovery plan, which he outlined in some detail, is to be a success.

A major goal of his plan is to get banks lending again — this time with ethics in play.

Obama talked about putting aside his personal aversion to bailing out banks and other businesses whose greed helped bring on the recession. He said the alternative, letting them fail or permitting the government to take them over, would see the recession go on indefinitely.

But bailouts are not free, he said, pointing to the regulatory reforms that come with them, reforms that will hasten recovery.

Obama said his stimulus bill, criticized by Republicans, will boost employment, which will boost demand — without which a recovery will be impossible. It will also provide the spark needed to improve schools and health care.

He talked about how all aspects of his plan, when fully firing, will again get industries hiring, banks lending and governments addressing the full scope of problems instead of just responding to the “tempest of the moment.”

Obama’s speech evoked an achievable image, that of America being known once again not for the number of doomed “financial instruments” it can dream up, but for the hum of its private sector and the quality of its public services.