All things considered, President Obama's budget speech before the joint houses of Congress went about as well as could be expected.  He conveyed an appropriately subdued sense of optimism at the beginning and end of the address, bookends for the more realistic and pessimistic guts of his proposals in the middle.  He had moments of poignant power, especially when he warned high school dropouts that they were not just letting themselves down, but their country as well.  And he generally mixed encouragement and stern warning in a convincing way, not an easy thing to do.  Post-speech punditry confirmed the greatness of the speech (Howard Fineman, Michael Beschloss, etc.), but there were also serious caveats about the devil in the details, as noted by Joseph Stiglitz. 

But all in all, I thought that Obama did a great job of explaining exactly why the credit markets need to be rescued, and how he plans to reduce the deficit while pumping through stimulus spending.  He called for specific action from Congress on numerous occasions.  He made specific promises with explicit target numbers, which will allow citizens and journalists to hold him accountable in the future.  And he did not waffle.  He talked about responsibility, and made it clear that if things don't work, he is ready to take the heat.  In short, he put it all out on the table.  As Mark Shields noted on PBS, Obama has decided that "political capital is not to be hoarded, but spent."  The President had a big electoral victory, as did his party.  He has high approval ratings and powerful majorities.  And he has the confidence and trust of the American people.  So he's not playing it safe.  He's jumping into the fray with an expansive and ambitious agenda, and making no apologies for it.  And if he continues to reach across the aisle to the Republicans (which he should do for political reasons), and keeps getting rebuffed, he will be able to take sole credit for any successes that emerge from his programs.  As we noted in an earlier posting, the GOP is taking a gamble that the economy will continue to tank.  If they simply distance themselves from the situation, and throw their noses up at Obama "socialism," they're counting on reaping the political windfall of a deepening recession.  I think this is both a bad political risk for the GOP (it's easily inoculated against by any competent Dem strategist), and is actually a borderline treasonous abandonment of the country, at the precise moment when leadership is needed from every corner of our federal government.  Polling is already showing that most Americans think that the Republicans opposed the stimulus plan for purely political reasons, and not for any principled concern for the American economy.

So Obama did about as well as could be expected.  It is a great relief to have an intelligent, eloquent, and serious person at the helm.  But there were also some discouraging facets to the performance.  While he did a good job explaining how we have been irresponsible in putting off hard tasks that should have been tackled decades ago (health care, infrastructure, alternative energy, education, bloated military spending), and how we have both personally and nationally racked up massive debt -- he did not make even the slightest suggestion that our sprawled-out, car-dependent, mega-consumerist lifestyle is itself to blame, and is inherently unsustainable at its core.  Now, of course, we can't expect him to echo Jim Kunstler's description of suburban America as the "greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."  But for someone who repeatedly references "responsibility" when talking about personal and political behavior, I was hoping for at least some mention on how incredibly wasteful our overall social form has become, especially considering the accelerating deterioration of our natural systems.  After all, climate change is not the only environmental problem.  Every major natural system and process is in decline, and burning petrofuels is not the only issue.  Our overall human activity and presence on the planet are too large, in the most general terms.  Solar panels, hybrid cars, and wind turbines are all wonderful.  But if they are simply plug-ins for an overall social project that endeavors to preserve the current landscape of work and consumption, we're toast.

Especially disappointing was Obama's quick glossing over of rail transport, on his way to a paean to the wonderful American automobile.  Combined with his post-petroleum talk and his touting of alternative fuels, Obama's continued enthusiasm for automobile culture is really a dishonest refusal to acknowledge how utterly unique oil really is, and how no alternative fuel(s) will allow the same scale or intensity of motor vehicle activity (especially heavy construction).  Another slight of hand was his description of how a revived credit system would help regular people.  "That’s what this is about.  It’s not about helping banks – it’s about helping people.  Because when credit is available again, that young family can finally buy a new home.  And then some company will hire workers to build it.  And then those workers will have money to spend, and if they can get a loan too, maybe they’ll finally buy that car, or open their own business.  Investors will return to the market, and American families will see their retirement secured once more.  Slowly, but surely, confidence will return, and our economy will recover."    

A nice vision, to be sure.  But do we really need more new homes built, and more new cars purchased?  In my neighborhood, there are a couple of affordable condo complexes that have been sitting empty for almost 2 years, as the gross disparity between real estate prices and declining wages takes its toll.  We've already got plenty of houses and condos and office spaces sprawled out all across out national tableau, and the dirty secret of the last few decades is that almost our entire economy has been shifted over to overbuilding and maintaining this unsustainable living and working pattern.  We're into the American Algorithm again here, the term I use to describe the full-employment, One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form that is too consumptive and too atomized to persist into the future.  We just have too much activity directed towards creating unsustainable, wasteful crap.  And once the cheap oil that undergirds all of this false growth goes away, we're not going to be able to continue the fantasy that 21st Century American will look like the roaring 90s. 

OK, enough about Obama.  Good speech, tough tasks ahead. I trust him and wish him the best, especially as he becomes the country's therapist-in-chief, once things really start to unravel. On to Bobby Jindal's underwhelming post-Obama speech from last night.  First of all, and I'm not being Maureen Dowd-ish here -- is it just me, or does Jindal sounds just like Kenneth, the NBC page from 30 Rock?  I found myself too distracted by this similarity to pay much attention to Jindal's speech in real time last night.  I was also perturbed by his biographical, folksy opening, so I kept flipping away from the speech.  But I read the transcript today, and it's pure GOP boilerplate, nothing too exciting.  As with many current Republicans, Jindal spoke as if the last eight years had not happened, as if it was not they themselves who have trashed the country and left us in this mess. Jindal mentions that it is the Republicans job to support Obama where the parties agree, and to provide better ideas than the Democrats when the parties disagree.  Good enough.  But were there any new ideas in Jindal's speech?  Not that I could see.  Here are the general problems with the current conservative ideology, as filtered through Jindal's speech:

• "The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens."  -- OK, nauseating enough as just an empty pander point.  But then he went on to use the government's response to Katrina as an example of how bad it is to trust the government's ways.  He told a story of a meddling bureaucrat who prevented good, hard-working citizens with boats from rescuing people in trouble.  Jindal told this story, I imagine, because he himself had a role in it, some "I play by my own rules" type of thing.  Not to mind-read, but I really can't think of another reason for him using the egregious actions of a Republican President to prove how ineffective government is.  Katrina is almost uniformly seen as Bush's low-point, and it's not a scenario that translates easily into the government-is-bad theme.  After all, it's great that private citizens had some boats to help rescue their fellow citizens.  But do we really want to trust "compassionate hearts" and an "enterprising spirit" in situations of natural disaster?  Not many churches keep fleets of helicopters and sandbags in their annexes, waiting to compassionately assist their neighbors.  I doubt that private hurricane relief businesses are going to sprout up in droves to take advantage of the huge profit opportunities.  We all know that private, entrepreneurial, for-profit relief companies would go where the money is, helicoptering out the rich, while the unprofitable poor are left to backstroke their way to dry land.  Just ridiculous.  Does anyone honestly oppose paying taxes to provide natural disaster relief to those that need it, and does anyone really doubt that a competent administration could get it done in an efficient manner?  Please.  Bad start for Jindal.
• "To solve our current problems, Washington must lead. But the way to lead is not to raise taxes and put more money and power in hands of Washington politicians. The way to lead is by empowering you - the American people. Because we believe that Americans can do anything." -- We're at the heart of the GOP mythology here, that they are about shrinking government and lowering taxes, and the Dems are about growing government and raising taxes.  As we saw in our Feb. 7th posting, "Stimulus Fandango," government spending has steadily risen over the last 50 years, in lockstep with general growth in GDP.  US governments of all stripes have kept spending at roughly the same size, as a percentage of the total US economy.  And in this respect, we are like every other industrialized country on the planet.  Large, growing, complex societies require a growing federal government to keep some semblance of order, especially as technological advancements allow for other forms of centralized power to emerge (think corporations, the media, and global finance).  So this GOP idea that, golly gee, they just want regular folks to keep their money and not pay some fatcat bureaucrats to mess things up -- it's pure hokum. However, as also noted in Stimulus Fandango, what is true is that the US is near the bottom of industrialized countries in overall taxation. You get what you pay for.  While other complex societies have used higher taxes to provide health care,  leveled wealth distribution, better unemployment benefits, more investment in education and research, and the like, the United States has kept overall taxation low, allowing for huge economic disparities to emerge, and social and physical infrastructure to crumble.

You get the idea.  The rest of Jindal's pablum is not worth detailing.  There's the usual smorgasbord of 'we gottas' -- we gotta have better health care, we gotta have better education, we gotta creat jobs, etc.  But since Republicans don't want tax dollars to do any of these things, we're left with the nebulous hopes that entrepreneurship, gumption, anti-corruption rules, and other non-spending incentives will do the trick.  Again, it's the usual shtick: play on everyone's disgust with Washington, describe complex problems in simple moral terms (fraud, waste, corruption), and hope that general conditions of decline result in large-scale, angry, anti-elite backlash, catapulting the righteous Outsiders to power.  It was the Sarah Palin formula, the John McCain maverick formula, and others -- you name it, Reagan, Goldwater, Newt.  The fake anti-establishment narrative that delivers the keys to the establishment itself, which then churns on as ever before, until the next campaign.  I gotta say, this GOP strategy is getting old, and may unleash pro-fascist forces that cannot be put back in the box, as we slide down the back slope of a Post-peak landscape.