The Essential Obama

In his address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday evening, President Obama challenged Congress to immediately pass the American Jobs Act, which brings together bipartisan proposals which would produce immediate effects to cause and stimulate employment and economic renewal.  He will be talking about the specifics all over the country in the coming days and weeks.  (Here's Ezra Klein's breakdown of the proposals.) But his address to Congress was exceptionally clear, focused and passionate.  It was the essential Obama.

For those who missed it and want more than soundbites, here is an enhanced version which includes sidebars of supplementary information.  Here's a transcript of the prepared address.

Congressional GOPers, perhaps mindful of their 87% disapproval rate and fresh from an earful from constituents, did not dismiss the President's proposals out of hand.

Others praised the speech for its forthright passion, and for the likely effectiveness and size of the American Jobs Act itself.  President Obama began by naming the urgency: "Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse."  Everything he said followed from this premise.  His proposals were shrewdly targeted-- for example, the incentives for hiring the long-term unemployed, when stories have appeared that employers are refusing to consider hiring anyone who has been unemployed for six months or more.  But together they added up to a package that was broad and deep as well as specific and targeted.  The construction and repair programs are needed anyway, the President said, and now is the time to do them.  Roads, bridges, airports, schools--for now and for the future.

Andrew Sullivan: "This was indeed a speech directed at independents and also at those who fear that America is in terminal decline. It was rooted in patriotism; it was framed to portray Obama as the pragmatic centrist he actually is. And it was not dishonest - these are the choices, short-term and long-term, that we have to make. And we should not be required to wait for another year and a half for action...

Game on, in other words. Except this isn't a game. And any politician who acts like it is in the next year or so will pay a price."

And here are some of the more entertaining responses from Sullivan's readers. Along with Sullivan's comment: "He seems utterly unafraid of the GOP."

As Ezra Klein says, the ball is in the court of Congress now.  While Paul Krugman joins the conventional political wisdom that not much of it will be passed, he concludes:  "The good news in all this is that by going bigger and bolder than expected, Mr. Obama may finally have set the stage for a political debate about job creation. For, in the end, nothing will be done until the American people demand action."  Getting that demand communicated to Congress is what President Obama will be doing now. He's going to the grassroots.  That, too, is the essential Obama.