In speech ad-libs, Obama shows anti-business bias

President Barack Obama waves before speaking after the annual Labor Day parade in Detroit, Monday, Sept. 5, 2011. Obama's speech at the annual event was serving as a dress rehearsal for the jobs address he's delivering to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Obama’s promise to regulate commerce looks far beyond the enforcement of written laws and contracts between adults. Instead, it portrays government regulators as referees in myriad private-sector deals, and as responsible for ensuring that adults do not make “bad” financial decisions, and are not “take[n] advantage of.”

Notably, Obama did not mention federal regulators’ sometimes disastrous record.

For example, the federal rewrite of lending regulations in 1994 forced much mortgage-lending to poor people, and helped inflate the real estate bubble.

Still, Obama’s hard-edged text and delivery also aimed to soften his criticism of the financial sector by also declaring that in the absence of regulations, “the vast majority of financial firms who do the right thing would be undercut by those who don’t.”

That concession is politically understandable, partly because Obama wants political support and donations from executives on Wall Street and in the financial industry.

Yet, as with his Wednesday speech, his Jan. 4 ad-libs tended to take a harder line than his prepared text.

The Cleveland script declared that “for too long, we’ve had a financial system that stacked the deck against ordinary Americans.”

Obama somewhat toughened that language from the podium, saying that “for way too long, we’ve had a financial system that was stacked against ordinary Americans.”

These impromptu changes were revealed because the White House released the prepared text, which different slightly from Obama’s delivered speeches.

But in many instances, the White House does not release the text, making it impossible to be sure which portions are Obama’s ad-libs.

In a Jan. 9 speech to donors gathered at Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hilton hotel, Obama portrayed his supporters as the equivalent of Americans in the 1940s, as Minuteman in a pitched battle with the British army, and as anti-discrimination marchers in the 1960s.

“It takes you, ordinary citizens committed to fighting and pushing, inching this country forward bit by bit so we get closer to our highest ideals,” he declared in a stem-winder of a campaign speech to seven hundred donors. “That’s how this country was built. That’s how we freed ourselves from an empire.”

But that flattering comparison was dropped from a very similar portion of the speech he delivered to Chicago donors Jan. 11. It is unclear if Obama ad-libbed the Jan. 9 stretched comparison with Minutemen facing British Muskets, or if his speechwriting staff dialed back his flattery of donors two days later.

Obama’s Jan. 9 fundraising speech also included a coded claim that a GOP victory would somehow reinstitute racial discrimination. “The very core of what this country stands for is on the line — the basic promise that no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, this is a place where you could make it if you try,” he said.

That claim of racist intent on the GOP’s part, however, was dropped on Jan. 11. “The very core of what this country stands for is on the line — the basic promise that no matter who you are, where you come from, this is a place where you can make it if you try,”  he told Chicago donors.

The White House released transcripts, but not the prepared texts, of the Jan. 9 and Jan. 11 speeches.

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