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President Obama’s Weekly Address and Key Speeches (Video)

President Obama’s Weekly Address and Key Speeches (Audio)

Best of White House Video

After hearing the President reference her school, the 110-year-old J.V. Martin Junior High School in South Carolina, in his first White House news conference, 8th-grader Ty’Sheoma Bethea wrote a letter pleading with lawmakers to address the dire situation the President described.

Tonight Ty’Sheoma will attend the President’s first address to a joint session of Congress as a guest in First Lady Michelle Obama’s box in the House of Representatives.

Leonard Abess Jr., a banker in Miami who shared $60 million in profits with his employees, will also attend, along with Geneva Lawson — one of the recipients of Abess’s generosity.

Bringing relief to the battered region of Darfur is a top priority for the administration, the President and Vice President assured the actor and activist George Clooney last night.

In separate meetings with President Obama and Vice President Biden, Clooney told them what he saw on his recent trip to Eastern Chad.

“We saw an awful lot of fear,” Clooney told Larry King last night of his visit to the region. “There was [also] a tremendous amount of hope.”

After six years of fighting, it’s estimated that 300,000 people have been killed and more than 2.7 million displaced in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Learn more about the joint United Nations-African Union mission there.

The first dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are going out in just two days — Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009 — in the form of federal support for state medicaid payments.

But the impact is already being felt well beyond that. Just today, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak announced that he was prepared to swallow hard and make significant cuts to public works and public safety. Thanks to the ARRA, he won’t have to:

And in Oregon, the funds dedicated to overhauling our energy grid are already spurring investment in green jobs:

This is big — the President today promised that by the end of his first term, he will cut in half the massive federal deficit we’ve inherited. And we’ll do it in a new way: honestly and candidly.

“This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected,” President Obama said. “But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay — and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”

Before we turn this boat around, we’ve got to acknoweldge how deep underwater we are:

“For too long, our budget process in Washington has been an exercise in deception — a series of accounting tricks to hide the extent of our spending and the shortfalls in our revenue and hope that the American people won’t notice…. budgeting zero dollars for the Iraq war — zero — for future years, even when we knew the war would continue; budgeting no money for natural disasters, as if we would ever go 12 months without a single flood, fire, hurricane or earthquake.”

“We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend,” the President said. “In order to address our fiscal crisis, we’re going to have to be candid about its scope.”

As the summit concluded, the President took questions and comments from the assembled members of Congress and the business and non-profit communities. He started with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who emphasized the need to cut excess from defense spending — citing as an example reports that the two-year-old plan to overhaul the fleet of Marine One helicopters had gone significantly over-budget.

“We all know how large the defense budget is,” Sen. McCain said. “We all know that the cost overruns — your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One. I don’t think that there’s any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money…[W]e have to make some tough decisions — you, Mr. President, have to make some tough decisions about not only what we procure, but how we procure it.”

“The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me. Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before — maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it,” the President joked, before continuing with a more serious response. “But I think it is an example of the procurement process gone amuck. And we’re going to have to fix it….One of the promising things is I think Secretary Gates shares our concern and he recognizes that simply adding more and more does not necessarily mean better and better, or safer and more secure.”

Last night, the President and First Lady hosted their first state dinner — a reception for the nation’s governors in the State Dining Room.

Before the dinner, First Lady Michelle Obama met with some students of the local L’Academie de Cuisine and introduced them to Cris Comerford, the White House Executive Chef, and Bill Yosses, the head pastry chef.

“When you grow something yourself and it’s close and it’s local, oftentimes it tastes really good,” Mrs. Obama said. “And when you’re dealing with kids, for example, you want to get them to try that carrot. Well, if it tastes like a real carrot and it’s really sweet, they’re going to think that it’s a piece of candy. So my kids are more inclined to try different vegetables if they’re fresh and local and delicious.”

Fun fact: the President loves scallops.

Students from L’Academie de Cuisine, White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, First Lady Michelle Obama, and White House pastry chef Bill Yosses.

We put together a short video with some highlights from the President’s first foreign trip. On the one-day trip to Ottawa last week, he met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and laid the groundwork for new cooperation on the economy and climate change.

Take a look.

$15 billion of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be available in just two days, the President announced this morning, just a week after the act was signed into law.

“By the time most of you get home; money will be waiting to help 20 million vulnerable Americans in your states keep their health care coverage,” he told a gathering of the nation’s governors in the State Dining Room of the White House. “Children with asthma will be able to breathe easier, seniors won’t need to fear losing their doctors, and pregnant women with limited means won’t have to worry about the health of their babies.”

But as with all the money in the ARRA, it’s “not a blank check,” the President said. (Learn more about the grant-making process.) He hammered it home by announcing that he’s tasked Vice President Biden to oversee  the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and that he’s named Earl Devaney to keep an eye on every dollar as head of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board.

A former Secret Service agent, Devaney has worked since 1999 as the Inspector General of the Interior Department, where he exposed the Abramoff scandals and a deep culture of corruption among Bush officials and appointees.

“For nearly a decade as Inspector General at the Interior Department, Earl has doggedly pursued waste, fraud and mismanagement,” the President said, “and Joe and I can’t think of a more tenacious and efficient guardian of the hard-earned tax dollars the American people have entrusted us to wisely invest.

“He looks like an inspector,” he added. “He’s tough.”

The appointment of Devaney follows on a tough memo from OMB director Peter Orszag to the heads of federal departments and agencies, explaining the high standards that are expected of them in reporting use of ARRA funds.

Two important takeaways from the President’s Weekly Address this morning.

#1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will start having an impact as soon as a few weeks from now, in the form of the quickest and broadest tax cut in history:

#2, once the economy has recovered and we’ve laid the groundwork for a sustainable future, the President is committed to taking on the massive deficits we inherited:

Watch the full address and read the text below.

White House photo 2/20/09 by Pete Souza

privacy policy | download .mp4 | also available here

SATURDAY, February 21, 2009
WEEKLY ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO THE NATION

THE PRESIDENT:  Earlier this week, I signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the most sweeping economic recovery plan in history.  Because of this plan, 3.5 million Americans will now go to work doing the work that America needs done.

I’m grateful to Congress, governors and mayors across the country, and to all of you whose support made this critical step possible.

Because of what we did together, there will now be shovels in the ground, cranes in the air, and workers rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, and repairing our faulty levees and dams.

Because of what we did, companies — large and small — that produce renewable energy can now apply for loan guarantees and tax credits and find ways to grow, instead of laying people off; and families can lower their energy bills by weatherizing their homes.

Because of what we did, our children can now graduate from 21st century schools and millions more can do what was unaffordable just last week — and get their college degree.

Because of what we did, lives will be saved and health care costs will be cut with new computerized medical records.

Because of what we did, there will now be police on the beat, firefighters on the job, and teachers preparing lesson plans who thought they would not be able to continue pursuing their critical missions.  And ensure that all of this is done with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability, I have assigned a team of managers to make sure that precious tax dollars are invested wisely and well.

Because of what we did, 95 percent of all working families will get a tax cut — in keeping with a promise I made on the campaign.  And I’m pleased to announce that this morning, the Treasury Department began directing employers to reduce the amount of taxes withheld from paychecks — meaning that by April 1st, a typical family will begin taking home at least $65 more every month.  Never before in our history has a tax cut taken effect faster or gone to so many hardworking Americans.

But as important as it was that I was able to sign this plan into law, it is only a first step on the road to economic recovery.  And we can’t fail to complete the journey.  That will require stemming the spread of foreclosures and falling home values, and doing all we can to help responsible homeowners stay in their homes, which is exactly what the housing plan I announced last week will help us do.

It will require stabilizing and repairing our banking system, and getting credit flowing again to families and businesses.  It will require reforming the broken regulatory system that made this crisis possible, and recognizing that it’s only by setting and enforcing 21st century rules of the road that we can build a thriving economy.

And it will require doing all we can to get exploding deficits under control as our economy begins to recover.  That work begins on Monday, when I will convene a fiscal summit of independent experts and unions, advocacy groups and members of Congress, to discuss how we can cut the trillion-dollar deficit that we’ve inherited.  On Tuesday, I will speak to the nation about our urgent national priorities.  And on Thursday, I’ll release a budget that’s sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don’t, and restoring fiscal discipline.

No single piece of this broad economic recovery can, by itself, meet the demands that have been placed on us.  We can’t help people find work or pay their bills unless we unlock credit for families and businesses.  We can’t solve our housing crisis unless we help people find work so that they can make payments on their homes.  We can’t produce shared prosperity without firm rules of the road, and we can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control.  In short, we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing them all.  And that is exactly what the strategy we are pursuing is designed to do.

None of this will be easy.  The road ahead will be long and full of hazards.  But I am confident that we, as a people, have the strength and wisdom to carry out this strategy and overcome this crisis.  And if we do, our economy — and our country — will be better and stronger for it.

Thank you.