Barack Obama's foreign policy speech on Tuesday made liberal use of one of our worst foreign policy clichés: the Marshall Plan. Here he is talking about development aid:

I know development assistance is not the most popular program, but as President, I will make the case to the American people that it can be our best investment in increasing the common security of the entire world. That was true with the Marshall Plan, and that must be true today.

That's why I'll double our foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012, and use it to support a stable future in failing states, and sustainable growth in Africa; to halve global poverty and to roll back disease. To send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, "You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.

On his blog, Yale's Chris Blattman asked leading aid skeptic Bill Easterly for his response:

All aid proposals since the 60s follow the same script:

1. announce an ambitious goal ('halving poverty')
2. invoke Marshall Plan as a very promising precedent
3. say you will double foreign aid (its always exactly double)
4. ignore the historical record on previous aid programs that also did (1) through (3)

I was disappointed that Obama's advisors didn't come up with something a tad more fresh and different. Since the press mostly ignored Obama's aid proposals, I guess the political incentive to do something more than the same old pro forma proposal is not very strong.

There's also not much pressure for Obama to say anything substantive about aid since John McCain isn't exactly offering much fresh thinking on the subject. Still, a candidate who's running on "change" and who's known for his genuinely brilliant rhetoric ought to be able to come up with something more original than "a new Marshall plan."