Follow Up to Obama's Job Speech

After my initial impressions of Obama's speech (overall positive on the speech itself, doubtful on the follow through, and suspicious of motives), I've spent the last few days reading through analyses and criticisms of the speech and Obama's plan moving forward. I have to say I think I'm with the critics. This was a successful campaign speech and nothing more.

Obama sounded emphatic, forceful, serious, and like a man who gets things done. He appealed to his strongest bases (Dems, education, public works unions), and reached out to a few swings (veterans, the unemployed, independents). But did the speech really mean anything beyond a stump speech?

One editorial I read today summed it up pretty well. Obama knew full well that this jobs bill would never pass. First of all, they're replays of the exact things that were in the first handful of stimulus bills: infrastructure, education, unemployment checks. We still have ridiculously high unemployment, the infrastructure projects we already "paid for" have not even begun, and education bureaucrats just pocketed the money and fired our teachers anyway. And those bills barely passed when we had a DEMOCRAT Congress. With a Republican Congress, they'll never get through.

And his explanation of "it will be paid for"? To increase the tax-cutting Congress is already failing to do? It's nonsense and requires tax increases that Obama knows Republicans will never agree to, and again are something he couldn't get the Democrats to agree to when they had control of the Congress.

Obama's not stupid. He knew all of this when he gave the speech. His exhortations of "pass this jobs bill right away" were appeals to the public at large, begging them to see that "At least I'm trying!" Now he can point the finger at Congress when unemployment fails to go down or, gods forbid, rises again. It's not his fault that things are bad; after all, he suggested this completely reasonable, non-partisan plan that would surely save us all.

The plan is to set up a completely unprovable counterfactual. In a year, he can say "If my plan had passed, we would be out of this dismal situation by now" in the same way his administration says of the former stimulus plan "If we hadn't passed it, we'd be even worse off by now." Counterfactuals are completely unverifiable but incredibly useful political tools. You use failed expectations of the past and present and future to gain political ground by insisting that even the worst policy decisions did some good or prevented some evil, even without evidence. It's just as easy for the other side to say the opposite: "by passing the former stimulus, Obama made the situation worse," or "We saved the country from even higher unemployment and deficits because we refused to pass Obama's jobs bill."

People don't seem to be falling for it, and the bill is unlikely to be passed at all.

I have to run now, but I might write later on the mentality that says "We have to do SOMETHING" when things are bad, even if that something often makes things worse. Or I might not. Depends on what I feel like writing later. :)