February 25, 2009 – 3:08 am
President Obama’s address in Congress last night was fine, if a little repetitive. Not repetitive of itself, but of the same messages we’ve been hearing for months (and from both Administrations, really). Economy’s rough, bad loans, losing jobs, taking action, improving credit, preventing foreclosures, holding scoundrels accountable. And of course there was the laundry list […]
February 24, 2009 – 4:20 pm
This evening President Obama will address a joint session of Congress, the speech which is usually a State of the Union address, except when it’s the president’s first year in office. No one wants to saddle the new guy with having to report on the state of a union he’s just taken charge of. This […]
February 23, 2009 – 4:32 pm
I’ve noted before that President Obama suffers from a bit of message schizophrenia when it comes to government spending. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes we’ve had too much, sometimes we haven’t had enough. This was on display again this morning as the president made opening remarks at his Fiscal Responsibility Summit. The topline […]
February 19, 2009 – 5:08 pm
Heart-tugging anecdotes are the mother’s milk of political speechwriting. If you’re a Democrat, you love talking about Susan, who can’t get health care and had to give up shoeing her children to buy groceries. (Preferably she lives in the Rust Belt and her husband, Jack, had an assembly-line job until an OSHA-worthy accident left him permanently […]
February 17, 2009 – 3:23 pm
In today’s Politico Playbook, Mike Allen mentions a new White House slideshow of behind-the-scenes photos from the stimulus negotiating process. The general theme of the pics is of a president vigorously doing the public’s work. Then there’s slide #4, which is a picture of the president meeting with Republican members of Congress. The caption notes this, then says: […]
February 17, 2009 – 10:53 am
Walter Berns — always thoughtful, eloquent, and worth the read — reflects in today’s Wall Street Journal on why Lincoln is our greatest public hero. He reminds us that history was not always (or even mostly) moving in Lincoln’s direction at the time he led the country, and that, time and again, Lincoln stood alone. […]
February 12, 2009 – 11:39 am
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove – no slouch when it comes to Republican strategy – agrees with Josh and disagrees with me about whether stimulus opposition will be good for Republicans. I agree with Karl that Republicans successfully branded this particular stimulus package a bloated, ill-prioritized porker. But they overshot. They forgot to […]
February 10, 2009 – 12:47 pm
Last night during his opening remarks, President Obama said: “[A]s we’ve learned very clearly and conclusively over the last eight years, tax cuts alone can’t solve all of our economic problems, especially tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few Americans. We have tried that strategy time and time again, and it’s only helped […]
February 10, 2009 – 10:52 am
As others have pointed out, one trillion dollars–which is what this stimulus “ye dare not call it pork” bill is going to cost–divided by 4 million jobs is……$250,000 per job! Where does one apply for one of these jobs? More to the point, wouldn’t it have been possible for at least one of our numerically-challenged […]
February 9, 2009 – 8:19 pm
I tuned into President Obama’s East Room statement/press conference this evening mainly to see if he’d use the teleprompter. He did use it during the first segment of his remarks and I think it hurt him. The prompter, as I noted earlier, is designed to help the speaker look at his audience more naturally. In a large […]
February 9, 2009 – 12:40 pm
On Friday I noticed that President Obama used a teleprompter when delivering his remarks on the economy in the East Room. I thought it was unusual because the East Room is a pretty intimate venue. I usually associate the teleprompter with bigger crowds and bigger spaces. I can’t think of a time when President Bush […]
February 9, 2009 – 10:25 am
Question: how does the spirit of bipartisanship jibe with Obama’s message (which I paraphrase only slightly), “You lost, we won, so stuff it!” Of course, the administration can count on the mainstream media to carry its water for them. The Washington Post seized on the total of three Republicans to go along with the stimulus […]
February 7, 2009 – 3:14 pm
According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, the Obama administration is searching for a phrase to replace the “War on Terror.” Good luck. This, of course, is the classic bureaucratic backwards approach to communications, in which people desperately search for just the right word or phrase to communicate a policy they can’t explain or an objective they […]
February 6, 2009 – 3:51 pm
I agree with Ed, but it doesn’t seem to me the Republicans are being obstructionist or even appearing that way, despite the President’s efforts to convey that impression. They’re not just standing athwart the stimulus bill saying “No,” they’re providing alternatives which might actually have a stimulatory effect and – another plus – seem to […]
