James Pethokoukis

First, the great Stan Collender:

But the real purpose of the speech was to refocus the financial services reform debate in Washington.  The president may have been speaking to Wall Street executives, but the real audience was members of Congress, especially Democrats, some of who in the next few weeks will be marking up various pieces of financial services regulation legislation.  He had to show that the general issue hasn’t gotten lost in the health care debate and to say that the effort is still needed even if things seem to be better (“Normalcy cannot lead to complacency”).

Me: I also found it interesting that he focused first and foremost on the consumer financial products reform aspect of all of this. I think that is a way of keeping the public engaged on the issue, though I am not sure the administration necessarily feels it is a crucial aspect of reform in and off itself. Kind of like fighting the last war.