In as much as President Obama’s speech tonight was uplifting, well delivered and relevant, the Republican response by GOP superstar Bobby Jindal was childish, repetative and boilerplate talking points.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s what the experts had to say.
BRIT HUME: “The speech read a lot better than it sounded. This was not Bobby Jindal’s greatest oratorical moment.”
NINA EASTON: “The delivery was not exactly terrific.”
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “Jindal didn’t have a chance. He follows Obama, who in making speeches, is in a league of his own. He’s in a Reagan-esque league. … [Jindal] tried the best he could.”
JUAN WILLIAMS: “It came off as amateurish, and even the tempo in which he spoke was sing-songy. He was telling stories that seemed very simplistic and almost childish.”
Those are all conservative commentators on Fox News by the way. At any rate, besides what the pundits have to say, I had been told time and again that the GOP was changing up the message and going beyond CUTTING EDGE in their attempts to stem the losses of the last two elections.
Yet tonight, we saw the GOP is going to stick to the same old rhetoric about “government being the problem” and “earmarks” while using their golden boy to deliver the same tired message.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and son Carter.
Dan,
I apologize for not being able to respond with a solid opinion on the speech. I could not watch it in real-time. I was working. My second job.
Steve
My personal “spit-take” during Jindal’s rebuttal came when he said, “Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need?”.
How soon Governor Jindal forgets that our current economic situation – the worst since the Great Depression – is due largely in part to the rampant borrow-and-spend tactics of the Bush Administration and his Republican-controlled Congress. Let us not forget the $200 Billion SURPLUS that Bush was handed in 2001, and how that became a $1.2 Trillion deficit by the end of Bush’s second term. Furthermore, the cost of our two current wars has largely not been included in these numbers either, likely making our actual deficit much worse than reported.
For Jindal to lecture the nation on fiscal responsibility is simply inconceivable. It would be outright comical if it weren’t so incredibly insulting to the intelligence of the average American.
So Governor Jindal, allow me to answer your question: “Your fiscally incompent, borrow-and-spend, head-in-the-sand Republican Party would, that’s who.”
Dan, none of the examples you cite talk about the substance of Jindal’s speech, only the way in which he delivered it. So Obama is the master of the telepromter and knows how to deliver poison on a silver spoon. Obama is the master of mixing in Reaganesk type verbage to quell the moderates while his hard left short track record says otherwise. Clearly he, like Clinton, has mastered the concept that you cant sell lefty ideas by actually calling them what they are.
David V., It is good to see that you believe borrow and spend tactics don’t work, and that the Clinton era tax cuts and welfare reform did work. Most of us conservatives were sickened, as yourself, by Bushs “compasionate conservative” positions. His failure to stop rampant government entiltement spending was part of the problem as you cite. But now that we both acknowledge massive unfunded government spending is a disaster, why is it that Obamas trillion dollar deficits for many years to come is a good thing to you?
That’s because there wasn’t any substance in his speech. Just stale catch phrases and ideology.
Sorry bonyT, I’m not buying your “Most conservatives were sickened…” line of BS. I am simply NOT BUYING IT. Period.
You and your cohorts stood MUTE while the Republican Party – NOT just Bush – THE REPUBLICAN PARTY – borrowed and spent like drunken sailors on leave.
The Republican record is clear: We are weaker nation both economically and strategically. Our nation’s infrastructure – energy, transportation, water, sewer, communication – received an overall grade of a D, with no category scoring about a C+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
And YOU and the rest of the Republican Party stood by and fiddled while Rome burned.
Now the bill for your party’s incompetence is due and we have two choices: dig deep and take the medicine, or we can sit back and play our fiddles more while Rome continues to burn. I think the choice is clear: we simply cannot continue to be a world leader until we repair the damage that the Republican Party has inflicted on the United States. If you think fiddling is the right answer, be my guest. You certainly are well-practiced.
So spare me your righteous indignation bonyT. If you had spent one quarter of the time chiding your own party’s leaders that your spend on Dan’s blog, we might not be in this mess right now.
Dave V., your post reminds me of the old story of little Jimmy telling his parents “Yeah, but Johnny’s parents let him do it”.
You’re right; the Bush administration’s policies of spending like drunken sailors or Democrats did contribute in part to our current economic woes. But if those wild spending sprees by the Bush administration were wrong for America then, then why would you support the current Democratic administration’s policy of continuing down that same disastrous path? Because “George’s parents let him do it”?
Are you criticizing Governor Jindal because you believe that his message on fiscal responsibility is wrong? If you are, then President Bush did exactly what you believe in, he spent like a drunken sailor and you should have no criticism of him for doing so.
Or, are you commenting on Governor Jindal’s message because you think he was right? If you are, then your criticism of him has been misdirected. It should have directed at the Obama administration and their spending of more than a trillion dollars that we don’t have.
I, along with many other conservatives, and also reflected in President Bush’s final approval ratings, believe that he spent too much money (that we don’t have) and helped contribute to our current economic condition. But what was wrong for President Bush is also wrong for President Obama and his administration!
David V, Im not trying to sell you anything. I just love pointing out your hilarious inconsistencies. According to you, we are in this mess because government spent “like drunken sailors”, but Obama will get us out of this by making the drunken sailor look like an amateur.
Another fallacious assertion, bonyT. There is nothing “hilarious” about the train wreck that your party left behind. Nothing. There is only a tremendous amount of hypocrisy in Republicans standing there, shaking their fingers in our faces, righteously lecturing the rest of us on the topic of “fiscal responsibility.”
Anyways, back to Dans original point. That was a great speech written by John Favreau, Obama really did a great job reading it. Got to love how he throws in conservative phrases to sell it.
Equating the current stimulus plan with the Republican spending record of 2001-2008 is like equating the medical costs of a liver transplant to the cost of buying the booze that caused the cirrhosis.
David V, unfortunatly, the “stimulus” will be like injecting the liver patient with adrenaline so he can get up and walk around and feel great for a few minutes just before he drops dead. I do think that Bushs doubling of the public school budget would have been better spent on booze, however. By the way David V., tell me again how your party has washed its hands from any blame associated with the real estate banking bubble burst.
David V – $650 mil for Digital TV coupons, $50 mil for Nat’l Endowment for the Arts, $142 bil for Federal Education Funds, $200 mil to repair the Nationall Mall, $335 mil to the CDC for STD prevention, $400 mil to NASA fro climate change research, $246 mil for Hollywood to buy motion picture film, $1.4 bil for rural waste disposal projects, $75 mil for smoking cessation, $1.2 bil for summer youth activies, etc., etc.
Please, stop calling this a ‘stimulus plan’ . . . it’s a ‘spending plan’.
A better analogy using your medical line of thinking is comparing the cost of the heart transplant to the cost of buying the booze that caused the cirrhosis. While the cost of the heart transplant may be well worth every penny that it costs, it won’t do a thing to solve the cirrhosis problem.
Same thing goes for the Obama spending plan. The cost for each of the above projects may be worth every penny that we spend on them, but they won’t stimulate the economy. They (and others that I didn’t list) are just pet spending projects.
I know that the Democrats have a hard time agreeing with anything the Republicans say, but this time we are on the same page. BUSH SPENT TOO MUCH! OK, I admit it (and so do many other conservatives), the Republican Party screwed up, they blew their chance, they helped us along down the sad economic path that we now find ourselves.
That takes us back to little Jimmy telling his parents “Yeah, but Johnny’s parents let him do it”. Just because “George’s party let him do it”, are the Democrats going to do the same thing?
Jindal wasn’t overly impressive.
Obama does give good speech. It serves as cover for his bad ideas.