The two for one speech

Even though yesterday did actually mark the date when President Obama had earlier stated that combat operations in Iraq would end, he still faced criticism for taking to the airwaves to announce this fact. The last combat troops had already left the country a while back, and recent economic news seemed to demand his attention. Obama's solution? To turn the speech into one about the economy.

You can read the full text here on MSNBC. But just listen to this opener:

I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty for many Americans.

We have now been through nearly a decade of war. We have endured a long and painful recession. And sometimes in the midst of these storms, the future that we are trying to build for our nation - a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity may seem beyond our reach.

But this milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment. It should also serve as a message to the world that the United States of America intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership in this young century.

Translation -- hang in there, I'll get to this economic stuff later!

To be fair, the President made some eloquent remarks about the war and the divisions it created within America. He did not shy away from the fact that he disagreed with it, nor did he ignore the painful price paid by the country in waging it.

But, come on, if you're going to talk about the war in Iraq - the war that so many of us opposed from the outset, the war that appears to have left the supposedly "freed" country on the verge of complete collapse - at least talk about the war and those who had to wage it. Give those people a minute of your time, and don't tweak the speech to match political goals.

Have a look at this particularly cynical bit at the end:

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation's long-term competitiveness is put at risk.

And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it is our turn.

Now, it is our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for -the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil.

We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President.

In one fell swoop, Obama blames the war for the current deficit, and then delivers his usual prattle about the "innovation" that will supposedly "unleash" a great new America.

To borrow one of the President's lines, let me be clear -- I was firmly against this war, aghast at the way it turned out, and glad to see so many American troops come home, hopefully to never return. Obama's hedge-betting is the problem here. He won't commit to a single issue and/or opinion, even in one little speech.  He heard the criticism about the timing of his speech given the country's economic problems, and changed the speech to make it about that.

Spend, but spend wisely

Howard Fineman, who usually writes well on the ups and downs of the Obama presidency, drops the ball a bit with his latest Newsweek column, in which he portrays Obama's recent speech in New Orleans as a defense of "big" government and the role it can play in people's lives.

If you rearrange Fineman's column a bit, however, the main problem with Obama's approach is vaguy alluded to:

The last 18 months have seen a hurricane of legislative activity by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. From bank and auto bailouts to health care to financial-services reform, the bill-passing season produced literally thousands of pages of new law.

...

More important, all of that macro-level legislating has done little, so far, to affect the economic lives of Americans as a whole. The unemployment rate is high, home prices and sales are shaky, the job market is bleak, and can-do confidence has gone missing.

And that's just the issue. What is odd is that Fineman doesn't consider Obama's approach to big government as the key problem here.

When the stimulus package was passed, the "Obama is a socialist" idea had not quite taken root. And, by all accounts, the stimulus did help the economy. The problem is that is was not large enough to actually stimulate additional economic growth. Rather, it provided a temporary palliative, as opposed to getting the machine running again.

Yes, the package was pared down in the Senate to appease Republicans. But one also has to wonder if Obama didn't push hard enough for a larger package because he had health care reform on the brain. No doubt he would he hesitant to spend too much knowing he had a trillion dollar policy program on the way.

And, of course, there are the problems with the health care bill, which seems more like a way to force Americans to enrich the coffers of the big insurance companies than it does a method to provide fair and equal access to health services for all. Again, a flawed bill ends up looking like wasteful spending, and the "socialist" moniker sticks even further.

And let's not forget the cap-and-trade climate change bill, which the Democrats simply allowed to die on the Senate floor, their political capital spent.

Obama's problem is not that he prefers big government. It's that he does big government badly, and hesitatingly, and with unfocused priorities.

The disppointment that is Barack Obama

After sucking up to him for way too long, treating him as if he were the second coming of JFK (remember that Brian Williams' series on NBC News that was essentially a love letter to the President and his family?), we're finally getting some serious criticism of America's 44th, as evidenced by this Newsweek article written by Michael Hirsh.

It's about time that this happened. As the mainstream media (and the so-called "progressive" blogosphere) fawned over Mr. Obama, they allowed a shadow narrative to take over that depicted the man as a Muslim, a non-American, a Communist, a Nazi, and everything else under the sun. That is to say, by failing to provide reasonable and measured criticism, they opened up a vacuum for a much more pernicious form of criticism.

But Mr. Hirsh get many things right here. The best points come at the end of the article:

There was so much passion and ambition in Obama’s words about fixing the economy [when taking office], and so much dispassion and caution in his policy choices. Early in the Democratic primaries, in January 2008, Obama had stunned many of his supporters by praising Reagan as a transformational president—a contrast to the eight years of Bill Clinton, Obama added cuttingly. Reagan, Obama said, “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Yet at what would seem to be a similar historical inflection point—what should have been the end of Reaganism, or deregulatory fervor—President Obama seemed unprepared to address the deeper ills of the financial system and the economy. Several officials who have worked with the Obama team said the president’s heart was in health care above all else. “He didn’t run for president to fix derivatives,” says Greenberger. “And when he brought in Summers and Geithner, he just thought he was getting the best of the best”—good financial mechanics, in other words, who would “get the car out of the ditch,” to use one of Obama’s favorite metaphors.

...

All of these challenges required a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. and global economy. Yet those who were most aligned with the “progressive” side of the Wall Street reform issue remained, for the most part, on the outside of the administration looking in. Among them were Brooksley Born, the former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Summers and Geithner, by contrast, had been acolytes of Bob Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who, along with then–Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, had presided over many of the key deregulatory changes in the ’90s. And they convinced Obama that the financial system they themselves had done so much to nurture was, on the whole, fine. As long as there were greater capital reserves, leverage limits, and more regulatory oversight, Wall Street could remain intact.

The thing is that anyone who was looking at the issues seriously at the time could see that Mr. Obama was pushing for health care reform at exactly the wrong time. Remember how he wanted the bill passed by the end of summer '09? He pushed way too far in the wrong direction while the dissident voices of the unemployed and underemployed grew stronger.

Health care reform is seriously needed in America (and it still is, since the bill that did pass was so flawed). Yet, in the midst of such a great economic crisis, it could have waited. If Mr. Obama had gone on television and said, "Look, I know I promised you health care reform, but the economy is in the gutter, so we need to deal with that so you can get working again," I guarantee you that 99.9% of the population would have agreed with him.

Now we have a flawed health care bill, a rather feckless financial reform bill, an economy that is still in the doldrums, and a president that has spent a huge amount of political capital to achieve little. Not impressive.