ABSTRACT
Two days before the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama stood at a podium in Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center, looking out on a large though not quite capacity audience of several thousand mostly fervent supporters. The speech was the president’s last official event of the campaign season and, as he had for the previous few weeks, he detailed the transition his leadership style had seen, noting that his early hopes for bipartisan comity had been dashed by an opposition who had a “basic theory” that the economy was so bad and that their party had
made such a mess of things, that rather than cooperate, [they would] be better off just saying no to everything. [They would] be better off not even trying to fix the economy. And people will get angry and they will get frustrated and maybe two years from now they will have forgotten that [they] were the ones that caused the mess in the first place.
(White House 2010b) Soon after this passage, Obama reached the speech’s climax with an extended automotive metaphor about his struggles to solve the nation’s economic woes in the face of congressional Republicans who were alternately ambivalent and oppositionist in their response to his policy proposals. The president reminded the northeast Ohio audience:Cleveland, imagine the Republicans were driving the economy like a car, and they drove it into the ditch. And this is a very deep, steep ditch. And Joe [Biden] and [then-Ohio governor] Ted [Strickland], we had to put on our boots, we had to rappel down. And it’s muddy down there and dusty and hot. Somehow the Republicans, they fled the scene. And now they’re up on the street and they’re looking down, and we call them down to help and they say, no, that’s all right. They’re sipping Slurpees, they’re fanning themselves. They’re saying, you’re not pushing hard enough. Sometimes they’re kicking dirt down into the ditch, making it a little harder for us. But that’s okay. We kept on pushing. We kept on pushing. We kept on pushing. And finally, finally we got that car back on level ground. It’s moving. It’s pointing in the right direction. It’s a little banged up. It needs to go to the body shop. It needs a tune-up. But it’s pointing in the right direction. And just as we’re about to go, suddenly we get a tap on the shoulders. And we look back, who is it? It’s the Republicans. And they’re saying, we want the keys back. Cleveland, we can’t give them the keys back. They don’t know how to drive. You can’t give them the keys back. They can ride with us, but we don’t want to go back in the ditch.
(ibid.; see also Horovitz 2010)