Belated Obama Speech Reaction

I didn't get to watch Obama's American Jobs Act (AJA) until long after it aired, since it went on at 7:00 EST/4:00 PST to appease all the mouth breathers that had to watch the NFL season opener over trivial things like the President addressing a joint session of Congress during the Lesser Depression. Here's a few thoughts:

1. Obama's speech offered the most full throated defense of liberalism and government's role in a modern society that we have heard him utter in quite some time. That was heartening for me, since the last several months have been completely played on the GOP's turf, both strategically and rhetorically. Just a matter of weeks ago, our political overlords were arguing over not if we were going to slash government spending, but by how much, with the President even trying to one-up the GOP at their own pathetic game. Now we have Obama decrying the GOP's insistence that America race to the bottom when it should be racing to the top, and repudiating the notion that we will use harsh economic times to dismantle the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. This is the kind of shit I have been yelling about for months on this blog. This view of government is exactly what Democrats and independents believe in, and what sets the tea bagger and GOP types into orbit. In other words, this is the drum Obama should have been beating all along.
2. It was sufficiently combative. Obama dropped the Conciliator in Chief canard for once and urged our modern Do Nothing Congress into action. And while the GOP will find any reason to oppose and obstruct this seemingly uncontroversial piece of legislation regardless, the President sought to strip them of their previously favorite cudgels: the deficit, and Obama's ideas as extreme socialist out-of-touch-with-middle-America liberalism. He repeatedly beat home the point that this bill contains ideas previously proposed and popular with both parties (indeed, tax cuts comprise almost half of the $450 billion bill), essentially daring the GOP to oppose this and tie themselves in knots in the process of doing so. He further challenged the Super Congressional Justice League Committee to pay for the bill in its entirety through finding the cuts/revenues to do so in their study due this November. Again, the Republicans will find some pathetic, infantile reason to oppose this anyway (the sky is blue, Obama is black, today is Saturday, because Obama said 'pass this bill now' and is mean and hurt our fee-fees), but he has made it incumbent upon them to find a new reason to do so.
3. More importantly beyond appeasing cantankerous bloggers like myself, the speech, and the bill itself, has already won critical acclaim. Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, a darling of both parties for economic analysis, estimates that the AJA would shave 1% off of the unemployment rate, adding as many as 1.9 million jobs. Other non-partisan estimates have that number even higher. Now moving unemployment down to 8% is clearly not enough. But this is a step in the right direction and much more effective than the GOP worldview of slashing government spending when no other entity, consumer or corporation, is currently spending either. And arguably, this could be used as a prototype to woo Americans away from the GOP's fire breathing ideology of government-is-always-bad-and-can't-help-create-jobs and enact further stimulus legislation down the road. Beyond Zandi, the speech seems to have placated Paul Krugman to an extent, who has long been the most strident critic of Obama's pathetically inept fiscal policies up until this point.

All of this is great, but the linchpin of this legislation will be the extent to which Obama follows through and hammers this home daily to the American public. That is not his strong suit. We've seen it before in the stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act - two pieces of legislation which should ostensibly be popular with the public were they properly informed of the content and the benefits for average Americans. The administration completely conceded the message on both of these, allowing the GOP to paint the stimulus as a failure and the ACA as a socialist government takeover of their Medicare. If Obama wants the AJA to succeed, he is going to have to do a much better job of selling it and repeatedly touting its benefits. I am cautiously optimistic that he will. This is now campaign trail Obama, who is arguably much more effective at messaging and agenda-setting than governance Obama (sadly enough). 

All that being said, this is a start. I'm hoping that we will see more of this fight in Obama and congressional Democrats as a whole going forward. They are going to need to sustain this aggressive stance and momentum if they want to have any hope of succeeding in 2012. The next election needs to be a referendum on two extremely different set of ideals, not bat shit Republicanism and slightly saner, less bat shitty centrism. It's a winning message, and one that the Democrats must sustain and hammer relentlessly for the next 14 months.