Time & Perspective Quote by Barack Obama

There’s a calculated intimacy in the phrase “We all knew this” - a verbal hand on the shoulder from a president trying to turn a national setback into a shared premise. Obama isn’t arguing yet; he’s establishing consensus. By repeating the line, he performs certainty twice: first to reassure, second to preempt dissent. If everyone “knew” the recovery would be slow, then impatience becomes less an objection than a failure to remember what we already agreed was true.

The core move is temporal triage. “More time than any of us want” concedes the public’s mood - the exhaustion, the anger, the desire for an instant fix - without validating the demand for one. It’s a pressure-release valve: yes, you’re right to want it fast; no, it can’t be. That “any of us” matters too. It collapses the distance between the White House and the kitchen table, framing delay as a constraint on leadership as much as on ordinary people. The subtext: I’m not dragging my feet; reality is.

Then comes the moral geography: “dig ourselves out of this hole.” The metaphor is blunt and physical, built for a country that was watching unemployment climb and foreclosures spread. It signals work, not magic; collective effort, not heroic rescue. “Created by this economic crisis” also subtly sidesteps assigning a culprit in the sentence itself - a strategic choice in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown, when blame (Wall Street, deregulation, the previous administration) was politically potent but could distract from selling patience, stimulus, and reform. The intent is to buy time - rhetorically - by making time the point.