Obama's presser

Moments ago, in this morning's press conference, President Obama was visibly indignant and as to close to manifestly incensed about the GOP's debt-talks intransigence as the president temperamentally can get.

It was a thing of beauty: "Call me naive," he said, but he believed that "leaders are going to lead" and "my expectation is they'll do the responsible thing" -- in contrast to the GOP's heretofore maniacal insistence that the middle class take yet more budget hits while billionaires, hedge-fund managers and corporate-jet owners glide through the debt-resolution talks unscathed.

Yet more intriguing, to me, was that in his opening, prepared comments, Obama emphasized not only the acute pain experienced by America's middle class from the Great Recession, but its enduring, pre-2007 socioeconomic challenges. The palpable reelection campaign message: another Obama presidential term will spell a judicious restructuring of America's intrinsically debilitated economy. His first term has been pragmatically limited to overcoming the GOP's ideological insanities and consequent material desolation, Obama seemed to be saying, but his next term will be about rebuilding -- fundamentally -- from the bottom up.      

That, anyway, was the way I read it -- I gleaned a touch of the Kennedyesque. Folks, just get me through the unavoidable pragmatisms of a first term, which always requires concessions to certain vigorous political realities that a second term does not. That lofty idealism demanded by the progressives will have to wait, but the loftiness will indeed come.

Comments

[Anne Johnson]

I thought he did a pretty good job. I always imagine this president as a frazzled father trying to drive a carload of squabbling kids across the country for a vactation the only difference being that he can't threaten to turn the car around. And I keep asking the same question: What do republicans have to gain from hurting the middle and lower class by taking everything away from us and giving it all to the rich, but somehow leaving us with still easy access to guns? When we have no jobs, no health care, no voting rights, no way to feed our families, do they think there will be no backlash? What are they thinking?

[Susan Zoon]

I LOVED THIS PRESSER.
My favorite line:
"Congress has got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time."
WOW! He flat out intimated they are the idiots that... well... they are.

[Susan Zoon]

@Anne-" What are they thinking?"
What they are thinking is that when we, the unworthy, are all without means- it will spell the end of the Democratic party, and perhaps the democracy itself and they will bee free to institute their Corporate Theocracy, keep collecting their fat paychecks and have the plebs on their knees begging to work for two dollars and hour. That's what drowning the Govt. in the bathtub looks like.

[CK MacLeod]

Anne Johnson: I think they're thinking that at this point the public doesn't know what most of these words mean, and, to the extent it thinks it knows, it's wrong anyway. In the meantime, they'll put on a show for their populist base for as long as they can until 1) the public actually starts to inform itself and 2) the donor base draws the curtain closed.

[Charlieford]

Good press conference.

But second terms aren't usually times of presidential strength. Because they're term limited, they're actually wounded ducks from the beginning of the second term.

Working backwards: Bush II, Clinton, and Reagan all had serious difficulties (perhaps disasters, in some ways) in their second terms. Nixon's of course was prematurely aborted. Even Eisenhower's 2d term saw his own base turning on him.

[Peter G]

I have often thought that the conservative or right wing animus towards social programs is rooted not so much in the cost of such programs as it is in the visceral belief that taking care of anyone not in your immediate family or tribe is evil. From a foreigner's point of view it looks as if the Republicans have made it their core policy to spend money on everything and anything that might prevent that money from being allocated to socialism. They certainly haven't been adverse to running deficits. That's why I wonder if their casual attitude towards raising the debt ceiling is merely the icing on the cake of this policy. The intent is to do so much damage that social programs will be eliminated. Raise borrowing costs enough and that will go along way to achieving that goal.