Politics & Power Quote by Jay Carney

The point isn’t to persuade you that the economy is booming; it’s to project steadiness while refusing to overpromise. Carney’s sentence is a classic artifact of podium language: layered, repetitive, and carefully buffered. “We believe” and “the President believes” are doing legal and political work, turning a claim into a posture. If the forecast sours, the administration didn’t “guarantee” anything; it merely held a reasonable belief. The redundancy reads like noise, but it functions as insulation.

The structure is also telling. Growth comes first, then jobs, then a pledge to “enhance” both. That ordering matters: it frames job creation as a downstream product of growth, not as something that might require direct intervention, redistribution, or structural reform. “Enhance” is the softest possible verb that still signals action. It implies competence and momentum without naming specific policies that could be attacked, scored, or fact-checked in real time.

Contextually, this is the Obama-era messaging style at its most defensive-optimistic, shaped by a skittish post-crisis public and a partisan economy where every data point was litigated. The sentence tries to occupy the narrow center lane: reassure markets and voters, imply active stewardship (“do everything we can”), and keep the policy surface area deliberately vague. The subtext: the White House wants credit for the recovery’s trajectory, wants room to keep pushing its agenda, and wants to avoid being pinned to numbers it can’t control.