Obama's open road

By presidential design and ultraconservative temperament, the GOP is stuck in a political box. Last night, Rep. Paul Ryan slammed shut the lid and sealed it.

Inside, with him, were the tedious hobgoblins of campaign fabrications -- the stimulus package created not one job! and healthcare reform is killing thousands more!; the frenzied bogeymen of hyperbole -- Good Lord, we're becoming Greece in a hammock!; and the solemn gremlins of unshakable ideology -- limited government + free enterprise (always) = socioeconomic paradise, even though our most recent, eight-year test of that simplistic hypothesis produced only a hellhole and damn near finished us off.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait provided the contrast:

Obama framed every issue in specific terms — here is a plan to improve education, here is a factory that is now growing due to my policy, here is a person who would suffer if we repeal health care reform. Ryan’s speech existed almost entirely on the plane of abstraction. Obama’s meta-theme was pitched straight at the center, while Ryan’s was pure right-wing dogma.

Pure right-wing dogma. That, in effect, was the electoral warning label Ryan slapped on the lid before slamming it shut. SOTU-responses generally are not the time to play to one's shrinking base, and I've no doubt that Ryan, Strategists & Co. understood that when concocting his script. But over their shoulders they also heard the thundering, cloven-hoofed herd of the grim-reaping tea partiers, listening for echoes of infidels and apostates.

When their internal Armegeddon comes, Oh what a lovely war it will be.

As for last night's main attraction and grownup portion, though, "pitched straight at the center" seems a fair way to characterize it. I would only add that while pitching to the center, Obama persisted in shifting the center, too, a bit to the left. He called for (implied) massive government investments in clean energy and transportion and information technology and thus new jobs, while ridiculing taxpayer subsidies for immensely profitable oil companies and, to the evening's most exuberant cheers, he called for an uncompromising end to those highest-income tax cuts.

Will this be enough for those insatiable progressive activists? Of course not. For they've surpassed mere insatiability on their Hope-Crosby Road to Utopia; they're now emotionally and even financially vested in their own little box in their own little world, playing to borderline-personality types who can no more tolerate the political hues between black and white or perceive the ideological spectrum between pure good and pure evil than a Michele Bachmann can.

In isolating the factional extremes, Obama is opening a wide-reaching field in which to run, unbeatably.

Comments

[Bobfr]

'In isolating the factional extremes, Obama is opening a wide-reaching field in which to run, unbeatably.'

Yep. And, excepting for teevee, no one would know those factional extremes exist. Even with teevee, those willing to tolerate brain damage by encountering them, will likely continue to dwindle.

Thank you for your excellent blog.

[Anne Johnson]

Obama's speech was, so to speak for mature audiences. Meanng people mature enough to deal with reality and offer real solutions to real problems. Paul Ryan's rebuttal was pure right wing boiler plate, and Michele Bachman's was not even good enough to be called pathetic. She couldn't even look at the right camera. Disneyland called and reported that one of their animitronic robots escaped.

[majii]

The PL and frustrati crew got "punked" by the president last night. They, along with the GOP, are in the doghouse out in the cold, exactly where they belong. It seems as if the members of the GOP all got the same memo that ordered them to stick to their talking points even if they were way off the mark as a response to the president's SOTU message.

I'm glad most of all that Bachmann was exposed as the incurious, lying, corrupt, not ready for prime time individual that she really is. Next, I'm glad that some Americans were exposed to the fact that the primary tactic in the GOP strategy to winning elections seems to be selling scenarios based on fear, gloom and doom with no clear real road map for doing anything for this country and its' citizens except working on behalf of the one and two percenters, Big Business, and Big Oil.

[Rick Kellis]

President Obama's sense of balance was in evidence last night. Balance surely is not achieved by discounting one side of an argument but by acknowledging both sides (actually more than two, for in this case, each side is at least split in half). Thus, he has assumed the goal of our Founding Fathers, esp. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who founded the Democratic Republican party--the forerunner of today's Democratic Party. It is a noble cause that serves our democracy/republic well and should be taken up by all Americans.

[janicket]

Wow, an analysis that's spot on, written with verve, wit, and enticingly enjoyable elegance! I just wandered in here from Eclectablog's link to you, have read down this far in the entries, and could no longer refrain from burbling my delight at finding a new blog to bookmark and return often to.