Obama Fires It Up in Williamsburg
At last, the fiery candidate Barack Obama has returned to inspire the troops in support of the stimulus bill.
Obama’s speech in Williamsburg to House Democrats undoubtedly carries some risk, as David Gergen pointed out tonight. But I think the moment called for it.
Frankly, I’ve found it a bit demoralizing to watch ideological conservatives claim that the stimulus package is nothing but a wasteful pork barrel bill – and nobody is on the television ready to fight back and defend it. Even though the grand total of objectionable pork barrel items pointed out by House Republicans amounted to about 1% of the whole bill, all we kept hearing about the last few days was STD spending and sodding the mall. It’s a classic GOP tactic – find one random item and hold it up as evidence that the entire bill is supposedly wasteful.
Obama has had enough of that. He recognizes that there are a small handful of Senate Republicans who will work with conservative Democrats to pare down some of the spending and get it passed. Yet, the opposition has come primarily from ideologues who think we shouldn’t be spending anything at all. It was that outdated ideology that lost in the 2008 election. And Obama is right to remind voters that there is a deep philosophical divide here that cannot be bridged by more bipartisanship.
This is the speech that many Democrats thought he should have given days ago. I know that I, a Democrat, am much more energized to defend the bill than I was before. I’m sure conservative Republicans will feel miffed. So be it.
Obama won the right to try it his way. If he fails, the Democrats will rightly get pummeled in 2010. That’s how democracy works.
UPDATE: Watch Obama’s full speech on this video here.
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3 Responses to “Obama Fires It Up in Williamsburg”
OK, so how do you defend a bill that's panned by the CBO for producing a likely net negative change in GDP over the medium to long term? Are you going to continue deflecting attention to the GOP for pointing out silly anecdotal evidence of waste or will you address the actual question of whether or not the short term benefits are outweighed by the long term costs, as indicated by the CBO projections?
If what the R's are harping on is only 1% of the bill, I'm still waiting for someone to outline what the other 99% is. Where's a bullet point list? All I'm seeing is an $850 billion tab at the end, now jumped to $920 billion. And THAT pisses me off.
treen: there are lots of lists, like here:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjcyODIyZG…
But the problem is that you can only find that information from people who are critical of the bill and the supporters won't even address the legitimate concerns.
You know, a lot of people, with some justification, feel that the neocons pushed us into war with Iraq by fearmongering, creating a sense of urgency, and demonizing those who dissented from their view of what was necessary (or even dared to question them.) I think it's time to coin a new term for those who are using this economic crisis for similar purposes- I propose that we call them the 'neoKeynes'. They'll broach no questioning of Keynesian ideas in general, no question of whether the government spending 'multiplier' effect is even real (or what the magnitude of it should be expected to be), and no question of whether or not Keynesian principles can possibly work when debt is the cause of the crisis to begin with.