First Draft

This is the first draft of the speech President Obama gave at Knox College on July 24,2013.

Hello, Knox College! Home of the Fighting Prairie Fire! Hope you are looking forward to this year’s football season. Last year, your were 2-8. and you had to get a new coach. The last name of that old coach wasn't "Bush", was it?

Eight years ago, I came here to deliver the commencement address for the Class of 2005. Now, things were a little different back then. For example, I had no gray hair. I really didn’t know Joe Biden.Those were the good old days. I didn’t have a motorcade. I hadn’t even thrown a baseball.  On top of that, I didn't even have a teleprompter.  I’m not even really sure I gave a speech here. They tell me I did, but the past eight years have been a real blur for me.

As you might have heard, I kind of went from being a big deal in Illinois to being a really big deal, if you catch my drift.  I’m President of The United States now. Whoot! Whoot! I can focus on things like the economy. Usually, I don’t like to focus on the economy.  To be frank, the economy is a little boring. How many of you like Economics 101? Not many? I thought so.

In case you didn’t know, I came to office in the worst of all possible economic circumstances. Banks were closing. People were losing jobs. Houses were being foreclosed on. It was “Buddy Can You Spare $400 So I Can Upgrade My iPhone”. Times were really tough. So I decided to do a Stimulus Plan. The plan was to give money out to stimulate the economy.  I decided the best people to give the stimulus money to were Union leaders and Democratic Party cronies.

For some reason, that didn’t work out like we planned. It was all George Bush’s fault.

Now, today, five years after the start of that Great Recession, we've fought our way back. Together we saved the auto industry. Look at all of those Chevy Volts out there! We took on a broken health care system and broke it some more because you can’t have an omelet without breaking some eggs. We invested in new American technologies to reverse our addiction to foreign oil. Now, some of those companies that we invested in have gone belly up, but hey, I had nothing to do with it.

We put in place tough new rules on big banks. We said, “Big Banks, you quit being mean to the middle class”. We changed a tax code that gives all of the breaks to the rich people like George Bush, Mitt Romney and Fox News.  We’ve asked those at the top to pay a little more but they don’t want to because they are all Homophobic Racist meanies that want people to starve in the streets.

So you add it all up, and over the past 40 months our plan has created 7.2 million new jobs. And about 100 of those 7.2 million jobs are full time! You can’t say it is not working.

But with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington's taken its eye off the ball. And I'm here to say this needs to stop.  I mean, every time I start focusing on the economy, I have people with the nerve-the gall- to disagree with me. Can you believe it?

They start to bring up Benghazi, like anybody gives a hill of beans about that. I mean, really?! Or they’ll talk about the IRS targeting only conservative groups, like it was a bad thing. Geez, some people.

My big time economic pivot is this: Have all of the rich people stop keeping their money and give it to people that don’t make as much money as they do. These other people will then go to the store and buy things. This will cause  stores to order more goods and the people that make the goods will hire more people. Then these people will become rich and give their money to other people that don’t make as much. I don’t how this cannot work. To put it simply, we advocate the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the country as a whole.

If The GOP will meet me half way-by that I mean give up everything they say they believe in-we can grow the economy and I won’t have to come to this forsaken part of Illinois again!