Obama's Speech

“This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules, ” Obama told a crowd packed into a school gymnasium in Kansas. Obama’s speech was the most direct condemnation of wealth and income inequality, and the most expansive moral defense of the need for government activism to combat it, that Obama has delivered in his career. Using the type of populist language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class. He said it “gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try.” This speech was notable for its more direct emphasis on inequality itself as a moral scourge and as a threat to the country’s future. He cast the question of whether government can and should act to combat inequality as a referendum on American values and our national identity.