Thursday, February 26, 2009

Stylin'

I watched Obama's speech, as well as Jindal's response, and I find a few things interesting...

First would be the response to Jindal's speech. People are saying that the speech wasn't good, but I think it was very good. Admittedly, the delivery wasn't as exciting as Obama's, but giving the speech to a camera in an otherwise empty room as opposed to a room full of fawning, applauding members of Congress is going to change the appearance. I think that a lot of this criticism is put forward by people who are worried about the strength of someone like Jindal.
The thing that Jindal did do was make people think. One of interesting the articles I read was about the sudden spike in online searches for the term volcano monitoring during his speech. That, among other things, would be one of the items that we couldn't do without in the Spendulus bill that Obama pushed.
So, did Jindal have the style that Obama had? No, but he had the substance that Obama didn't have. For example,

1) Obama talked about the deficit that they "inherited" which drew laughter and applause from the Democrats in the room. Really? Who was that running congress for the past few years? I'm not going to try to exonerate Bush, because the man did spend like a drunken sailor in a nudie bar. However, for members of congress to act like they just arrived in Washington to find a budget deficit left behind by someone else is preposterous.

2) He also talked about how we need to be more fiscally responsible and cut the deficit in half. Again, really? Being that the moves he and his cohorts in congress made in his first month in office more than doubled the deficit, to cut it in half still leaves us with a deficit larger than when he started in office.

3) He cited $2 trillion in savings "over the next decade." A nice thought, but the fact is he can only be sure he has a say in how money is spent over the next four years. He might be able to pull off eight years, but he won't be there for 10. It is common political speak to make projections beyond when you will be in office. That way if you want, you can put off things like huge program cuts or tax hikes until someone else is in office. You still get to make the grand statement, but you don't have to do the heavy lifting that comes with it.

4) Obama referred to the United States as the country where the automobile was invented. The fact is that while Henry Ford did invent the assembly line, which made it easier for everyone to get a car, historians generally agree that the car was invented by a man named Benz in Germany.

5) Obama said that regulations on the banking industry were taken apart and that people bought houses they couldn't afford and unscrupulous banks pushed the loans, "And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day." He implied that it was the Republicans who were responsible for this. That flies in the face of the fact that it was the Clinton administration that pushed for the changes in the banking laws and, in recent years, while the Republicans (like John McCain) were calling for more oversight, it was Obama's friends like Frank, Dodd, Reid and Pelosi who were saying that everything was fine and stifling the GOP's efforts to change the course of this problem.

6) He, once again, touted his plan to "create or save 3 million jobs." This is an excellent thing to say, but it's just that - something to say. First of all, the only way that the government could guarantee 3 million jobs is to hire 3 million people for government work. Either that or conscript them into the military. I don't know, maybe he's planning on bringing back the draft, but I doubt it. The fact is that his own economists said in a report last month that, "It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error." How many jobs are in a significant? Five, 10, a million, a couple of million? Who knows? There's really no way we'll ever know how many jobs are saved as a result of the stimulus. We know when people lose their jobs, but the estimates of jobs saved are based on predictions of how many jobs would be lost without the stimulus. So, basically, if we lose 10 million jobs, he can say that he figured we would lose 13 million and therefore he saved 3 million. Also, there's no way to figure how many jobs would have been created whether or not he put a giant spending bill out there.

These are just a few of the notable problems with Obama's substance. There were many more that have been noted by a number of outlets, but lest we forget, he did have style and that's what this is about, right?

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