Obama’s Bully Pulpit Or Just Plain Bull?

Striking a slightly angrier rhetorical tone yesterday, President Barack Obama warned the American people that failure to enact his stimulus package could result in irreversible economic hardships. Interestingly, that’s just what I would say about passage of this heaping pile of crap.

Writing in an Op-Ed piece in Thursday’s Washington Post, Obama sought to reinforce the dire straits the US faces: “This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

Obama also rejected traditional stimulus measures such as tax cuts to help jump start the economy. “I reject these theories,” said Obama, “and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”

Here, I think Obama may be in danger of misreading the American public’s desire for and the scope of his mandate for change. The financial market meltdown last Fall provided democrats with their own version of an “October Surprise”, sealing the deal for voters weary of eight years of republican executive management. Americans elected Obama largely because he sounded like the fiscally conservative grown up in the room, at least among independents. And as deficit projections from the proposed stimulus and financial bailouts balloon to over $2 trillion, with much of the spending provisions remaining a permanent fixture of federal spending, Americans are understandably nervous.

The president then promptly blamed republicans for holding up the package in Congress. In a speech before the party elite later in the day, Obama slammed the Bush Administration for running up the national debt, and mocked republicans for questioning the stimulative aspects of the package – “What do they think stimulus is, it’s spending!” But Democrats are firmly in the driver’s seat here and should have the votes necessary to pass the bill without republican support. And surely a bill that adds almost a $1 trillion to the public debt should be carefully reviewed, shouldn’t it?

Clearly, things are not going Obama's way. He needs to wrestle control of the debate back from the more left leaning elements of the party and recast it in a more bi-partisan and less fatalistic fashion. Wasn’t this type of fear-mongering the same tactic President Obama accused his opposition of relying upon during the campaign?