Did not see all of the speech last night, stuck in class until late, heard some of it on the radio, watched the last half-hour on the tube. CNN replayed portions the rest of the night. Liked the tone of what I did hear a lot. Uneasy about the lack of specifics, but that’s the nature of these kind of speeches. Ambitious - I suppose you never want to let a crisis go to waste. But, you know, how are we going to pay for all these things?
Bit about education was interesting, particularly the line about if you drop out of school you’re betraying your country. Here in Lancaster County we’ve got a higher dropout rate than the state as a whole. He’s talking to us.
This part resonated particularly well with me:
[W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.
That has been our disease - the byproduct of an instant gratification consumer society.
Overall, it was politically masterful - David Gergen on CNN called it a political masterpiece. Blunt about the challenges we face but inspirational - we can do it. I want to hope so.
Jindal, afterwards, was a disaster. He strengthened a little bit near the end, but early on, it was literally as if he was talking to children. It was reminiscent of the way Bush spoke - talking down to people’s intelligence, instead of talking to them like adults - and taking it for granted that they can keep up.
Then there was the forced hominess. Lots of folks thought he came off at Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock. My wife thought of another TV character:
“Oh my God,” she said, echoing Chris Matthews. “He sounds like Gomer Pyle.”
Ahhh sed, Sherffff…. Golllllleeee!
Via Nate Silver, David Brooks’s (mild conservative) reax to Jindal:
I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I oppose the stimulus because I thought it was poorly drafted. But to come up at this moment in history with a stale “government is the problem,” “we can’t trust the federal government” - it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we’re just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say “government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,” it’s just a form of nihilism. It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is.
Small wonder my right-wing correspondents are focusing this morning not on the content of Obama’s speech, or anything Jindal said - but on Matthews’ open mic.
