To understand the import of President Obama’s address to Congress last evening, you need to pay more attention to the tone than the content.
This was not the staid, wonkish, DC insider-speak that normally inhabits presidential addresses. Also absent for the most part was the equally standard rhetorical flourishes honoring America’s founding and history from which all presidents draw inspiration.
No, last night, President Obama used the language and tone of a rally to try and rally Congress.
His presentation was feisty and focused. At turns, challenging and defiant. It seemed at times that he fairly shouted the speech.
It was much less Dwight Eisenhower and much more Muhammad Ali.
Last night, President Obama was “float[ing] like a butterfly, sting[ing] like a bee.”
That is important because the tone was the glue that held the content together of an otherwise unremarkable address.
After all, there really isn’t anything new here.
Since 2009, Congress has already passed unemployment insurance, a payroll tax cut and 100% expensing for capital purchases.
Under Democratic control, the Congress passed $820 billion in “stimulus” that was supposed to fund “shovel-ready” construction projects, as well as generous pay-offs to public sector unions by entreaties not to abandon teachers and first responders. There was also job training.
Yes, there were other sweeteners last night. The speech called for immediate small business tax relief to promote job creation. And in a very un-Obama-like twist, the President said the entire package – about $450 billion – would be fully paid for.
Of course he did not say how.
Looking at the speech broadly, by proposing more of the same, the President exposed the fundamental weakness of this proposal and those that preceded it.
It’s all temporary.
Indeed, despite the President’s punchy urgency, the proposal is simply another dose Keynesian economics – using short-lived government spending to prop up the economy – a policy that has yet to produce anything but slow growth and high joblessness.
Indeed, if nearly a trillion dollars over the first two years of the President’s term led only to a large increase in unemployment, it is hard to understand how a program that is roughly half the size is going to have a greater impact now.
For the targeted beneficiaries of this new government largess, there is a seriou business question of whether short term expansion now, to take advantage of the new tax breaks, is viable in an 18 month window after the relief lapses and tax rates return to normal.
For these reasons, the policy components were “filler” to answer the President’s central political question: what will an ideologically divided Washington do for the American people between now and November 2012?
But by focusing on the lowest common denominator of bipartisan ideas and legislation that has already passed, whatever comes of the America Jobs Act will likely have little if any real impact on the American economy.
It is a legislative talking point in a larger political narrative for 2012.
And that’s where the real action was.
Since Republicans won the midterms, President Obama has appeared at turns, uneven, sidelined and listless.
The GOP has run circles around him both in controlling the political narrative and achieving its objectives; extending the Bush tax cuts last December, and winning a debt ceiling deal that was all cuts and no new taxes in August.
But far worse for a president with a 42% approval rating, President Obama was facing a restive and angry base. He isn’t just hemorrhaging independents, but increasingly facing durable skepticism from his most loyal supporters.
So last night, the President ditched his distasteful whining about the “mess” he inherited and the pity-party for the hurdles he has faced, and instead opted for the absent optimism, focus and determination of candidate Obama from 2008.
That is why last night seemed both new and familiar at the same time.
The sense of impatience and the nod to accountability. The focus on action. The focus on common sense solutions that all Americans can get behind.
The Obama we saw last night was the Obama that Americans thought they voted for. Indeed, an angry base saw a Party leader who, in “Rocky-esque” fashion, apparently has come to terms with his circumstances and is now prepared to come out fighting.
Will it work?
The President has a ponderous, unpopular and mostly unsuccessful record now that he did not have in 2008. But America is the land of second chances. Much will depend on the Republican nominee and the sense of their fitness for office.
Still…..
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”