RUTHFULLY YOURS

JAMES TARANTO: THE GREAT PERSEVERATOR….ANOTHER OBAMA SPEECH

Posted By Ruth King on September 1st, 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904716604576542552821233200.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Are you sitting down? If not, you probably should be, because we have some stunning news: Barack Obama is giving a speech next week. “Obama plans to propose his new jobs plan in a prime time address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7, a week from today,” USA Today reports.

As blogger Ed Morrissey notes, Obama previewed the blockbuster oration in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams:

Williams: Let’s talk about another topic that’s part of the firmament here and everywhere. And that’s the economy. The New York Times said this weekend, “President Obama has another new plan on the economy. Now would be a good time to find out about it.” Do you have anything new on the economy? And while you’ve been away, we had a horrible GDP number last month.

Obama: Well, look, we–we anticipated that the recovery was slowing. The economy is still growing, but it’s not growing as fast as it needs to. I’ve got things right now in–before Congress that we should move immediately. And I’ve said so before I went on vacation, and I’ll keep on saying when I–now that I’m back.

Are you nodding off? Wait, there’s a punch line! That interview aired on Sunday, Aug. 29. How can that be, when today is Wednesday the 31st? The interview aired last year.

NBC News/YouTubeObama in 2010, saying the same stuff.

Can we keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result? Yes, we can! Ronald Reagan’s detractors called him the Great Communicator. In a sign of how standards have fallen, Obama’s admirers think him a great communicator. But he would be more aptly called the Great Perseverator. To the untrained ear, he sounds like a one-man echo chamber, endlessly repeating after himself.

Yet in reality, he doesn’t do it on his own. Rather, he is at the center of a feedback loop enabled by a vast media apparatus. He listens to “friendly” journalists and commentators who praise his brilliant oratory and his progressive ideas and scoff at his opponents. One example is the pundit who said of congressional Republicans: “These folks so far have not been very responsive to public opinion . . . which is why they are very unpopular right now. But they’re speaking only to a very narrow segment of the population, their base.”

In case “folks” didn’t give it away, that pundit’s name was Barack Obama. He offered that analysis yesterday on “The Tom Joyner Morning Show.” As we noted last month during the debt-ceiling debate: “The so-called mainstream media is engaged in a bizarre propaganda effort, aimed not so much at persuading voters to agree with Obama but at convincing politicians that voters agree with Obama.” One way in which they do this is by “selectively citing survey numbers to paint a picture of wide public support of the president, when in fact the polls are more ambiguous.”

The Joyner interview is the latest evidence that this propaganda effort has been partly successful, in that it has persuaded Obama that the voters agree with him, his sub-40% job-approval ratings notwithstanding. Republicans, we suspect, have a more clearheaded view of the matter. That is not because their innate mental faculties are superior, but because media hostility is a lot less seductive than flattery.

For a wonderful example of such flattery, consider Eugene Robinson‘s column in yesterday’s Washington Post. “President Obama’s promised jobs plan needs to be unrealistic and unreasonable, at the very least,” Robinson writes. “If he can crank it all the way up to unimaginable, that would be even better.”

That seems like odd advice, but Robinson doesn’t really mean it. It’s just his cute way of suggesting that Republicans are unrealistic and unreasonable:

This is a moment for the president to suppress his reflex for preemptive compromise. The unemployment crisis is so deep and self-perpetuating that only a big, surprising, over-the-top jobs initiative could have real impact. Boldness will serve the nation well–and, coincidentally, boost Obama’s reelection prospects.

Note how that paragraph opens with flattery disguised as criticism: Oh Mr. President, you’re just too reasonable! (It’s false flattery, too. Obama’s trouble, as we saw during the debt negotiations, is not that he is too willing to yield, but that he adheres to his positions too rigidly.)

So what bold plan does Robinson have in mind? The drumroll please:

Obama and his advisers know very well that this is the wrong time to cut government spending. They know that using federal money to seed big new initiatives–to upgrade the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, jump-start the “clean” energy industry, retrain the unemployed so they can compete in tomorrow’s job market–would give the economy a much-needed boost. They know, too, that federal action to buoy the housing market would help revive consumer spending, thus giving corporations a reason to invest the estimated $1 trillion they’re sitting on.

Such ambitious proposals would demonstrate that the president is willing to think big–that he is not willing to accept the Republican narrative of massive retrenchment and, by implication, inevitable decline.

We’re not kidding. Robinson actually advises the president to rehash the same discredited ideas he has spent his entire campaign and presidency peddling. And we’ll bet Obama does it, too, because he knows that guys like Robinson will praise him for being “bold.” Robinson acknowledges it won’t actually pass Congress:

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives would immediately declare any such ambitious program dead on arrival. The president should welcome their opposition–and campaign vigorously against it. He can offer voters a choice between a pinched, miserly vision of the country’s prospects on the one hand and an optimistic, expansive view on the other.

Empty optimism, fierce partisanship, bad ideas–come to think of it, that combination worked very well for Obama in 2008. But that year, he was in effect running against a failed incumbent. We suspect he will find it more challenging to run as a failed incumbent.

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