Update below
President Obama, you're a pretty good basketball player, we're told. You should be driving the ball up the floor, slashing to the basket and scoring on layups (dunking seems unlikely).
Instead, you're giving up easy points to the lousiest players on the opposite team. Worse, you're not even playing defense. Where is the full-court press from your team? They're barely showing up to put a hand in the face of the outside (cable) shooters and blocking out the inside big men (Republican Senators). You're in danger of losing the game, guy, and you don't seem to be pushing very hard.
Time for a halftime pep talk to your players (Democratic Senators), and make it a rousing one. Get loud (ask for some nationwide TV time) and make your case to the crowd (us).
If you lose, it will define your entire season (first term). Don't let that happen.
Update: Now this is more like it. From the President's press conference today:
But make no mistake: A failure to act and act now will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future. Millions more jobs will be lost; more businesses will be shuttered; more dreams will be deferred.Posted by Linkmeister at February 4, 2009 08:27 AM | TrackBackAnd that’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that is before Congress today. With it, we can save or create more than 3 million jobs, doing things that will strengthen our country for years to come.
It’s not merely a prescription for short-term spending. It’s a strategy for long-term economic growth in areas like renewable energy and health care and education.
Now, in the past few days, I’ve heard criticisms that this plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.
I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.
So I urge members of Congress to act without delay. No plan is perfect, and we should work to make it stronger. No one’s more committed to making it stronger than me, but let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential. Let’s show people all over the country who are looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the task.