Quote of the Day: What Was In Obama’s Speech and What Comes Next?

Our political Quote of the Day comes from Ezra Klein, who was always one a must-read blogger when he wrote on a smaller blog and is even moreso as a blogger for the Washington Post. His subject: what was in President Barack Obama’s jobs speech last night and what comes next? Two sections from it:

The proposal itself is called “The American Jobs Act” and amounts to about $450 billion worth of ideas that have, at other times, commanded a bipartisan consensus.

That’s section one — an important one because basically Obama just listed a list of favorite bipartisan hits. But they were oldies: in the new climate, it’s considered partisan treason by some to cooperate with the other side. And if the other side is advocating something you once did, so what? What matters is positioning for the next election.

Klein lists some specific policies and then, owards the end, he has this:

The plan, taken as a whole, attempts to include every single theory of how to address the jobs crisis. If you believe we need more direct spending, you’ve got the infrastructure component. More tax cuts? The plan has $250 billion in tax cuts. More help for the unemployed? Yep. More deficit reduction? Next week, the White House will release a package that offsets this plan and reduces the deficit by more than $1.5 trillion on top of that.

Of course, in much the same way that everyone can find something to like in this plan, everyone can find something to dislike. If you believe tax cuts are ineffective during a demand-driven crisis, the plan spends a lot of money on tax cuts. If you don’t believe in infrastructure spending, there’s plenty of it in here to offend you. If government spending goes against your moral code, well, the government is going to spend money. And next week, when the Obama administration releases its deficit-reduction ideas, liberals are going to be a lot less enthusiastic than they are tonight.

So the question for members of Congress ends up being simple: do you want to focus on the things you do like and compromise on the things you don’t like in order to get some action on jobs and deficit reduction? Or do you want to focus on the things you don’t like and abandon the things you do like in order to kill the legislation? All Obama can do is ask. Now it’s up to Congress to answer.

But Time’s Michael Scherer sees the answer to this: the political circus will continue:

But in the chamber around him, the circus endured. The Democratic side erupted in applause, with many rising to their feet, while the Republican side sat still, most of its members stone-faced with hands in their laps. This is how it is these days, and how it most surely will be for most of the next 14 months: Even the most basic call for common purpose will be rebuffed as political poison. While the country suffers, and the suffering increases, everything in Washington is political posturing. The circus is all consuming.

When Obama called for Republicans to “put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong,” there was no response from the GOP side of the aisle. When Obama pointed out that Republicans had once supported many of the proposals he was putting forward, Sen. John McCain was the only Republican who bothered a seated golf clap. When Obama said that his new stimulus plan would be a boon for “job creators,” a favorite phrase of Republicans in Congress, crickets from the Grand Old Party.

On the whole, Republicans in the chamber treated the event as the political trap that Obama intended it to be, an attempt to strong arm them before a national primetime audience into supporting policies they despise. The bill Obama proposed, called the American Jobs Act, was a $447 billion program to stimulate the economy, with almost all of the spending coming over the next year. The plan pairs broad-based payroll tax cuts and hiring incentives with funding for teachers, police and fireman and major construction projects. In scale, it looks a lot like the 2009 stimulus bill, which had spent $787 billion over slightly more than two years, though there were some concessions in substance. The President’s proposal depended much more heavily on tax cuts, which Republicans have traditionally supported in the past. Obama also promised to offer ways to pay for the new spending with other program cuts, though he offered no specifics.

But the Republicans of the past are not the Republicans of today…

And, he contends, what will happen is this: not much.

But it will never pass, and that brings Obama to his next step. “You should pass it,” Obama said later in his speech Thursday night. “I intend to take that message to every corner of this country.” This political pressure, Obama calculates, will force Republicans to the negotiating table. Republicans have already signaled that they are willing to cut some deal to help stimulate the economy, though the outlines of the compromise are unclear.

And so we are left with the circus for the foreseeable future—a President calling the country to rise above politics even as he plays it and a loyal opposition that maneuvers for the next election. Both sides will play to the American people, who have made perfectly clear that they are sick and tired of being played to by both sides.

“So let’s meet the moment,” Obama told the jaded chamber, at the end of the talk. “Let’s get to work.” Neither is likely. If the country is lucky, it can only hope to muddle through.

And, as it muddles through, the average American (who doesn’t fly around the country in a private jet or rent planes with income from demonizing one political party on their talk show, who doesn’t eat each day in the Senate dining room, who doesn’t have the health care the members of Congress have, who does have a fat bank account like many members of Congress or as many houses as many rich politicians do) will continue to suffer while partisans in each party continue to view the battle as an adrenalin rush inducing version of professional wrestling with goal of winning for your political team.

Hope and change increasingly seem displaced by hopeless and unchanging.