Obama Lays Out Education Priorities
Hidden deep within the stimulus bill was a big pot of money for the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, to change education in America: $4.3 billion for "incentive grants" which will be awarded to states on a competitive basis based on the state's ability to do things Duncan and Obama want; and $650 million, which Duncan can award directly to school districts, non-profits or public/private partnerships, for stuff that pleases Obama and Duncan.
The Economy's Psychic Threshold
Most of the press coverage about the U.S. Government's response to the crisis thus far has focused, appropriately, on what is being done. Is the stimulus big enough? (Paul Krugman, along with a bunch of other economists, including Zandi, says no.) Is the U.S. Treasury acting fast enough to deal with the credit crunch? (A rising Libor index, which measures interbank lending, and the continuing rush to government issued bonds, suggests no.) But these policy issues are small compared to the impact they have on the nation's psyche. Confidence is the ultimate thing that will either save us, or doom us.
In other words, even if the toxic banking problem was solved tomorrow, and the stimulus was big enough to rebuild every bridge in America, none of it would matter much if you stayed scared, if you remained worried that you could be laid off tomorrow, or if you started padding your mattress with $100 bills.
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If Obama has a single task before him, as the most celebrated communicator of his generation tasked with leading the economic recovery, it is to temper this rising contagion. Good speechs will not be enough. He will, over time, have to find a way to calm the markets, address the concerns of his responsible critics, and then use these successes to assure consumers everywhere that better days do, in fact, lie ahead, a claim that virtually every economist would endorse, though many disagree on the timing.
Team Obama's Petty Limbaugh Strategy
President Obama won the presidency by promising to be a different, more substantive, less gimmicky leader. He said he would not waste our time on "phony outrage," like fulminations on the meaning of "lipstick on a pig," or silly characters like "Joe The Plumber," a guy who was actually named Samuel and was not even a licensed plumber. No, Obama said he was going to solve problems instead. Now that he is in the White House, he still makes this case, almost every day. On Wednesday morning, during an address about contracting reforms, he referred dismissively to the "chatter on the cable stations."
But what is the chatter on the cable stations? For most of this week, and for much of the last month, it has been about Rush Limbaugh. Hour after hour, daytime pundits are asked a litany of banal Rush questions: Does Rush really run the Republican Party? Why did RNC chair Michael Steele apologize to Rush? What does it mean that Rush addressed conservatives last weekend? As Jonathan Martin makes clear in the Politico today, this entire controversy has been cooked up and force fed to the American people by Obama's advisers.* In other words, it's not the kind of change you can believe in.
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But here's the rub: If you believed what Obama said during the campaign, then Carville is dead wrong. Republicans in Congress are not the only losers. The American people also lose. At a time of unprecedented threats to the United States, a time of financial collapse, bank failures and record layoffs, at a time when the credit crisis has not been solved, and the stock market is in free fall, at a time of stagnating wars, rising terrorism in Pakistan and growing nuclear potential in Iran, the White House has done the easy thing. It has asked the American people to focus their attention not on solving the problems, but on a big-mouthed entertainer in Florida. This may be smart politics. But it is also the same petty strategy that John McCain employed during the presidential campaign, the one that our new president promised to rise above.
Now in regards to that last quote its important to note that Scherer covered Senator McCain in such a favorable fashion last year that at times you would have wondered if he was a part of the man's communication team. You certainly didn't hear him calling out McCain for what he now calls a "petty strategy".
Its just Tuesday but I am officially making the call. Mikey Scherer wins Wanker of the Week!
Blog challenge of the day, count how many Republican talking points Scherer used in those three posts.
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