President Obama to emphasize America's can-do spirit in tonight's speech

In a little over an hour, Barack Obama will deliver his first official Address to Congress as President of the United States. It's not being called a "State of the Union", but for all practical purposes, that's what it is.

The White House has released an excerpt from Obama's prepared remarks to highlight what the President plans to emphasize tonight. It's a pretty stirring message, and it'll probably sound even better than it reads when Obama says it.

But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.

The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach.

They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure.

What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.

Amen to that. We've bounced back from tough times before - there's no reason why we can't do so again.

Decades ago, as he assumed office during the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered many of the same reassuring observations President Obama plans to make tonight when he spoke these words in his first Inaugural Address:

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it.

Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.

Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

For eight years America has been governed - or not governed - by an administration that didn't seem to want to acknowledge that economic security was deteriorating, let alone do anything about it.

Now we have a leader who cares - and it shows.

The President's address is scheduled to begin at 6 PM Pacific Time.