Sorting out Obama's address -- and Bachmann's 'facts'
By Eric Black | Published Wed, Jan 26 2011 8:01 am
President Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington.
REUTERS/Pablo Martinez MonsivaisPresident Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington.
The mantra was “win the future.” President Obama used that phrase or variations on it 10 times in his State of the Union address last night. It linked up with “innovate/innovation” (11 times), “compete/competition (10)” and also “jobs” (31) plus other buzz phrases to suggest that Obama knows what Americans want done — for the immediate future of the unemployed and underemployed and also for the long-term future of all of our kids — and has concrete (if smallish) ideas for getting it done.
Were you convinced? The instant polling suggests he sold it to those who watched, although such samples are always biased because more Dems tend to watch a Dem prez (and vice versa for Repubs). Most SOTUs are not long remembered, and I doubt this one will be an exception.
My own reaction? Mezza mezza. I Liked about two-thirds of his specific ideas, which is close to how I’ve been feeling about Obama for a few months now. By the time the speech began, I expected it to be an almost abject surrender to the Repub demands that he aggressively shrink the domestic discretionary budget. It wasn’t that, although I expect Paul Krugman will slam Obama for a retreat from his already tepid Keynesianism.
I think it was less than a surrender. The right will convict him of spendaholism because he offered only a flexible freeze on domestic discretionary spending while they want to roll it back. He offered a hand of compromise. I predict the Repubs will bite the hand and continue threatening to block the debt ceiling hike. They are playing with fire. I hope it ends happily.
Couple of high points
If Obama was trying to position himself closer to the middle of the spectrum, and as the adult who seeks reasonable compromise, I suspect he succeeded. Noting the much-hyped (but nonetheless pleasant) gesture of Repubs and Dems sitting together for the speech, Obama said:
“What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.”
Repubs will have to think hard about whether they can afford to respond to that by continuing to portray Obama as a raging socialist and continue to offer him a series of take-it-or-leave-it propositions.
(Interruption for a brief political analysis: Obama, at the moment, looks like he will coast to renomination, so he can start appealing to the middle right away, while the Repub 2012 presidential candidates will have to position themselves as cavemen — and cavewomen — to get the nomination. Chances are, pending developments, that this helps Obama’s chances for a second term, although that will depend much more on the actual performance of the economy than on ideological positioning.)
On education, Obama broke out of the usual left-right argument over whether the key to better results is more spending or the power of teachers’ unions with this nice “personal responsibility” paragraph:
“It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child. Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair; that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline.”
But, other than in his own role with Sasha and Malia, it wasn’t clear how he addresses the parental issues.
The teachers’ unions may have been slightly unnerved by “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.”
As one would have expected, he warned Repubs to get over the idea of repealing the health care bill, but offered to work with them on improving it. He embraced the long-standing Repub goal of limiting medical malpractice lawsuits in order to avoid the practice of defensive medicine.
Having caved in or compromised, depending on your perspective, on Repub demands in December for an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, Obama warned that he still wants to get rid of them. He also proposes to go after tax breaks for oil companies and generally talked trash about various business tax breaks that he’d like to repeal, as an offset for a general reduction in business tax rates.
As advertised in advance, he rejoined the crusade against earmarks and promised to veto any bill that comes to him with earmarks in it.
The writing of the speech was prosaic but workmanlike and solid. Obama delivered it well, as usual.
Repub responses
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wis., who gave the official Repub response, looked like a rookie by comparison, although he did better than the usual sacrificial responder. Sitting in a room by yourself (as Ryan did) just never lives up to the ermine robe and scepter treatment afforded to the prez when he visits the House chamber.
Ryan, the new chair of the House Budget Committee, is one of the most substantive of the radical fiscal hawks in the Repub caucus, and has actually developed a serious (if politically risky) plan for reining (and also privatizing) Social Security, and reducing the projected growth of Medicare (by voucherizing it). Ironically, he made no mention of his own ideas and stuck to a vague and bland (but civil) critique of Obama’s big-spending ways.
And, of course, Minnesota’s own Michele Bachmann also weighed in with a response on behalf of Tea Party Nation. Only CNN carried it. If you watched it there, as did I, you would have thought that she needs remedial help with her teleprompter skills, since she never looked directly into the camera. (You can see the unsettling effect here, as well as the whole speech). CNN noticed it too and reported post-Bachmann speech that she was looking directly into the camera that was feeding the Tea Party Express online.
Bachmann, as is her wont, took liberties with the facts, for example using a graph that wildly exaggerated the portion of the 2008-9 unemployment spike that could be attributed to Obama’s policies, versus those of his apparently more kissable predecessor.
She also repeated the already discredited estimate that the IRS will have to hire 16,500 new agents just to police the Obama health care bill.
Vin Weber’s reaction
I called former Repub congressman (now lobbyist and Washington bigfoot) Vin Weber after the speeches, and he surprised me with his reaction.
Weber considered Obama’s speech OK, not great or memorable, and felt the same about Ryan’s rebuttal. He said, surprisingly, that he agrees more with Obama’s position on the short-term discretionary spending freeze than on the Repub demand for deeper cuts in that portion of the budget. Something had clearly disappointed him sorely.
When I pressed him he said that Obama “had an opportunity to hit it out of ballpark” by making a serious stab at the long-awaited, much-advertised, never-begun adult conversation with the American people about what it’s really going to take to tackle the deficit/debt issue, namely a proposal to rein in the long-term cost of the big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare.
Since Republicans are so narrowly focused on the deficit, Weber “thought President Obama really had the opportunity to change the debate, if he had surprised everybody and said something serious about entitlements.”
The bipartisan deficit reduction commission, which Obama appointed, put out serious proposals for long-term, gradual changes in Social Security and Medicare, Weber said. Serious fiscal conservatives know that without tackling those programs, the federal debt cannot be controlled. If Obama had put it on the table, Weber believes, Republicans, who “have their green eyeshades on” and could not afford to look unserious about a big debt-reduction proposal, would have had to go along with him.
Obama, who has always presented himself as a serious debt hawk, “had an opportunity to break through,” Weber said. Instead, Obama made only a passing reference to the need for bipartisanship in dealing with Medicare and Social Security. Ryan also passed on it.
A few days after the midterm election, Weber had told me that he had high hopes that the work of the deficit commission might be taken seriously and lead to the tough decisions that will have to be made someday. Last night could have been the moment, perhaps the last moment for the work of the deficit commission to get serious consideration, Weber thought and hoped. But it passed.
Politics | Wed, Jan 26 2011 8:01 am | 14 Comments
Like what you just read? Support high-quality journalism in Minnesota by becoming a member of MinnPost.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment