The most significant moment came when the President's asked Americans to get up, get involved, and ask Congress to lay off the insanity.
Ari MelberPresident Obama did not say anything particularly new in his unprecedented deficit address to the nation on Monday night. The most significant moment came not in an original announcement or last-minute proposal, but in the president’s request that Americans actually get up, get involved and ask Congress to lay off the insanity.
“I’m asking you all to make your voice heard,” the president said near the end of the address.
“If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your Member of Congress know,” Obama continued, “If you believe we can solve this problem through compromise—send that message.”
Even for a politician who ran on his (brief) history as a grassroots organizer, that is unusual. It may really help—there were reports of Congressional websites crashing from traffic spikes on Monday night, according to the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman.
The potential problem, however, is that while Obama admirably walked through the facts on deficits and default, he did not offer a clear, single, final offer for would-be supporters to rally around.
This was a speech that talked about the roads not taken as much as the road ahead. Take this meandering couplet:
Congress now has one week left to act, and there are still paths forward. The Senate has introduced a plan to avoid default, which makes a down payment on deficit reduction and ensures that we don’t have to go through this again in six months. I think that’s a much better path, although serious deficit reduction would still require us to tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform. Either way…
And on it went, as Obama narrated negotiations that even political junkies can’t keep straight.
Obama also reminisced about the other presidents who ran up deficits and then raised the roof, quoting Reagan on policy and Jefferson on philosophy. In the end, the focus on process over tangible goals is most evident in a picture of Obama’s verbal priorities.
This chart, based on the frequency of Obama’s word choices, does not suggest a single, overarching goal. After the obligatory salutes to Americans, the takeaway is more about technocratic process than a key priority at stake, or a hardball closing argument.
Apparently, it all comes down to our approach.
The Nation’s Ari Melber debated Obama’s speech with former Bush aide David Frum on MSNBC’s The Last Word on Monday night:
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Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.