Presidential GENIUS: Telling city that voted for McCain "the American people rejected those ideas"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Monday February 9, 2009 15:30 EST
Obama goes bipartisan for real



President Obama takes part in a town hall meeting at Concord Community High School in Elkhart, Ind., Monday.

President Obama returned to the campaign trail Monday morning, a tad belatedly in my opinion, to sell his recovery and reinvestment plan. He went to Elkhart, Ind., which didn't actually vote for him in November. This was smart bipartisanship, not the silly kind we've been seeing in Congress, where Democrats put ineffectual Republican ideas in the stimulus bill, and cut good ideas, but still get few or no GOP votes.

But the Elkhart region has the nation's fastest-growing unemployment rate -- it's 15.3 percent, up from 4.7 percent only a year ago, and it's been hit hard by RV-industry layoffs. The president didn't screen his crowd or his questions, unlike his timid White House predecessor, but the rollicking hour-plus town hall felt like an Obama rally anyway. He laid out his spending priorities -- getting money in the hands of people who'll spend it, creating and saving jobs, and in the meantime, putting people to work doing things the country needs, not makework. And the crowd loved it.

Although he was speaking in a city that went for John McCain, Obama didn't pander to congressional Republicans at all. In fact he tweaked them by repeating a line that reportedly hurts their feelings: "We can no longer ... resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place. That was what the election was all about -- that the American people rejected those ideas because they didn't work. You didn’t send us to Washington because you were hoping for more of the same. You sent us there with a mandate for change, and the expectation that we would act quickly and boldly to carry it out -- and that is exactly what I intend to do as president of the United States." Obama warned that without bold action, "millions more jobs will be lost ... and our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse."

To his credit, the president pitched his recovery and reinvestment plan as built around a "simple" core idea: "to put Americans back to work doing the work America needs done." The plan would save or create 3 million jobs, he said, "but not just any jobs -- jobs that meet the needs we’ve neglected for far too long and lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth." Obama also laid out the underlying basis for putting money in low-income, working-class Americans' hands, via targeted tax cuts, credits and rebates and expanded unemployment spending: "If you don’t have money, you can’t spend it. And if you don’t spend it, our economy will continue to decline."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/02/09/elkhart_rally/