Will he or won’t he? Will President Barack Obama rebound after a toe-stubbing week when rather than remind many analysts of a new Abraham Lincoln, or create a feeling of deja vu about JFK or FDR he seemed to be arousing sinking feelings that perhaps America was getting a preview of the new Jimmy Carter of the 21st century?
Obama finished the week by rebounding, by delivering to Democrats a stem-winding speech in which he argued forcefully for his beset stimulus plan’s passage and took on his GOP critics. And now, as the Senate today takes up a stimulus compromise hammered out by moderates, Obama has used his weekly radio/You Tube address to repeat a theme he made in that speech — that it’s time to move away from “tired old theories” of the past 8 years that he and many others helped get the U.S. into its present — increasingly messier — mess:
The Christian Science Monitor’s politics blog suggests this speech is like a song with four notes: doom, I won, scrutiny OK and tired old theories.
CBS notes that the Senate is discussing the proposed bill right now — and that Republicans had something to say about Obama’s You Tube comments:
The U.S. Senate has gone back into session this afternoon, as it moves closer to a vote on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan.
Last night Democratic leaders reached a deal with a handful of Republican and Democratic moderates to trim more than $100 billion dollars from the plan, which now totals about $827 billion dollars.
Moderates pushed for cuts in programs that might not generate sufficient jobs quickly.
Meanwhile, President Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address to stress the need to pass the bill, saying it will jump-start the struggling economy and put people back to work.
CBS then quotes from the address above and adds:
In the Republican response, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said lots of money in the stimulus package is going to the wrong place.
The compromise came late Friday evening, reports CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, after a core group of seventeen Democrats and Republicans went through the bill line-by-line, crossing stuff out.
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. Said, “We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cow.”
They stripped out more than a hundred billion dollars in areas like education. Republicans had said the provisions, though worthy, were not likely to produce jobs – the stated goal of the economic stimulus. That makes this version of the plan cheaper than the House’s, with its $819 billion price tag.
One of the plan’s biggest critics remains the man Obama defeated in the presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain, who has labeled the plan ” page after page of pork barrel spending.” Bujt Obama and other Democrats have responded to that by basically saying: So what? It’s a stimulus plan and it’s whole point is to spend and pump money into the economy.
One of the biggest fans of the new plan is the man liberal Democrats love to hate and conservative talk show hosts love to love: Connecticut Independent Senator Joe Lieberman:
The compromise agreement was reached Friday after days of private meetings between centrist Democrats and Republicans who felt the $900 billion price tag on the Senate’s earlier version was too high.
“There is a winner tonight,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut and one of the moderates whose support was crucial in efforts to corral enough votes for the plan. “It’s the American people, and they deserve it.”
Senate Democratic leaders are so confident the package will hold that Democratic staffers in the House and Senate are not waiting for the final Senate vote to hash out differences between their two bills, according to a Senate Democratic leadership source, who said behind-the-scenes negotiations were under way Saturday.
What was cut from the original bill? CNN gives this list of items that were cut.
Meanwhile, talk radio and conservatives have been attacking the plan on several fronts. One criticism was that the nonpartisan CBO concluded the plan would hurt the economy.
But that claim has turned out to be false.
The other is that Obama is now “The President of Fear” — a theme hammered home on conservative local and national talk shows yesterday (listened to on a 6 hour drive yesterday broken up into 9 hours from Orange Cove, CA down to San Diego).
The argument: by repeating the bad financial news and talking about how bad things can get Obama is trying to “scare” the American public and creat a climate of fear. Here’s a copyrighted cartoon (licensed to appear on TMV) by Scranton Times cartoonist John Cole that reflects that theme:
FACT: Anyone who surfs Google News can find a zillion stories with terrible economic news, terrible economic forecasts.
This seems to be more political jiu-jitsu than reality. George Bush often came under fire in the media, from economists and politicians for claiming until it because dire that the economy was really strong. Only conservatives and talk show hosts claimed suggests that the economy was ill were overblown (or that if there were problems it was “the Clinton recession” far into the term of George Bush).
Bottom line: go to THIS LINK and spend a few hours going through the stories and then see if you conclude Obama is creating a false issue — or acknowledging a reality that thoughtful members of both parties also note. And also look at this link. And then this link.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.