The springs of hope

Thirty years ago a president faced with an economic crisis in the aftermath of an unpopular war attempted in what became a famous speech to rally the nation and to prepare the people for a fundamental reordering of American society. President Jimmy Carter wanted a new start after the foreign policy disasters, the domestic scandals and the economic dislocation that had engulfed his predecessors. He condemned the greedy pursuit of personal and sectional advantage and called for radically different policies at home and abroad, especially in the way the United States produced and used energy.

"Confidence in the future," said President Carter, "has supported everything else - public institutions and private enterprise, our own families and the very Constitution of the United States." Americans "had always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own" but "our people are losing that faith", and restoring it was the most important task before the government and the nation.

Mr Carter's arguments were remarkably similar in some ways to those which President Obama laid out with his usual cool eloquence at Tuesday's joint session of Congress. In 1979 the American people were not ready for the message, which soon rebounded on Mr Carter and contributed to an already marked decline in his popularity. But in 2009 there are many reasons to suppose that they are. The scale of the economic crisis is far larger and many more Americans recognise that root-and-branch reforms rather than temporary repairs are required. Above all, this president is a man who has managed to project the crisis as an opportunity in such a way as to emphasise the opportunity rather than the crisis.

The country is not only to be rescued but remade. Mr Carter's tone was dolorous, but there is an extraordinary lilt to Mr Obama's rhetoric which puts a bounce back into everyone's step. It induces in his listeners the hope that Americans will get back not to where they were before things went wrong, but to where they should have been had they embraced the far-sighted policies that men like Mr Carter in vain urged on them in the past.

Mr Obama touched in his speech on the immediate measures taken to steady financial institutions, save jobs and businesses, and shield ordinary people from the worst effects of recession. But he also put the crisis in a long perspective. He spoke of the budget he will soon submit to Congress as not "a laundry list of programmes" but "a blueprint for the future". He looked back, as Mr Carter did, to a regrettable period of indulgence and greed. But he also looked ahead to a different America. Education, health and energy are at the heart of Mr Obama's vision, a vision in which a better schooled and fitter people in a fairer society will serve a leaner and cleaner economy, and that economy will in turn serve them.

The ambitious nature of the programmes the administration is launching is already evident, and they will probably get more ambitious. But the president took care to emphasise that times will get harder before they get better and also that the people's money, deployed in such huge quantities, will be monitored every inch of the way and that officials will be held accountable for every dollar they spend.

There are two currencies in any great economic crisis. One is cash and the other is hope. Hope and money are, we understand better now than we did before, quite intimately related. Mr Obama has an advantage over other politicians, in that his unusual honesty is now widely recognised even by opponents. He does not oversimplify and he attracts trust. There may come a time when we will have to judge him more harshly but that time is not now. The president may not yet have managed to get credit flowing, but, with this speech and others, he has undammed the springs of hope.