Perhaps it’s just a product of the late-August silly season, but I gotta say, the “Speechgate” furor of the last twenty-four hours is one of the emptiest headline-grabbing controversies in living memory. Sure, you can expect conservatives to rant and froth over every single thing the president does or doesn’t do. But is this really the proper topic for an angry intra-progressive debate?
Yes, it is entirely reasonable to wonder why the White House chose to pick and then lose so inconsequential a fight.
Beyond that, the micro-saga seems to have become yet another excuse for Obama’s progressive and/or centrist detractors and defenders to whale on each other.
This note at Salon from a detractor, Cenk Uygur, really caught my eye, because it did summarize the perpetual debate over Obama’s strategy and tactics, even as it prejudged its outcome:

[T]his leads to the eternal question of whether Obama is just weak or if he is a brilliant strategist who has been playing rope-a-dope all along. I am so silly that I still had hope. My hope this morning was that Obama was laying a trap for the Republicans. He picks a day for his speech that is the same as the GOP debate. Then if Boehner says he won’t let him give the speech on that day, he seems so petty and harsh.
That way, either the president gives his big speech on jobs and bigfoots the Republican contenders or the Republicans look disrespectful and petulant for turning down the president. Well, if you’re playing rope-a-dope, that’s not a bad maneuver. But it turns out that’s not what he was doing at all. He just stumbled into this problem and then stumbled out when he let Boehner dictate when he could and could not have his speech. That looks so sad.
You see, if you’re playing rope-a-dope, at some point you have to actually swing. When your opponent has worn himself out knocking you around the ring, you counter-attack. But that counter-attack is never coming. We’re holding our collective breaths in vain.

Putting aside Uygur’s prediction of what lies ahead, this analysis is exactly right in interpreting “Speechgate” as just another tiny brushstroke in the picture that will ultimately emerge of the White House’s strategy for dealing with an obdurate GOP that is obstructing action on a terrible economy. If Obama winds up looking like a feeble timeserver who has sacrificed the active support of his political base while failing to convince persuadable voters of the stark choice they face in November of 2012, then perhaps “Speechgate” is another small step down the road to perdition. If he ultimately gets re-elected while discrediting and dividing the GOP for years to come, “Speechgate” could turn out to be a little nudge in the direction of making Boehner’s House look like Gingrich’s.
As a thing in itself, though, it’s really the epitome of a nothingburger. It’s not like the president could propose anything in a “jobs” speech, whenever or wherever it is delivered, that could actually be enacted while actually making a major difference in the economy. As Jonathan Chait acutely explained earlier this week, it’s all about political positioning now. We all have our opinions about how that positioning should be executed, and how much responsibility the president and his advisers bear for bringing the country and the Democratic Party to this juncture. But it would be a good idea to refrain from pretending that every small maneuver in the political wars is an epochal event that proves the president’s fatal weakness or Machiavellian wisdom. Just as a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, a soon-to-be-forgotte series of Beltway jabs and feints is sometimes nothing more than a late-summer diversion.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
TO: MITT ROMNEY
FROM: BILL GALSTON
SUBJ: YOUR CAMPAIGN
Every successful presidential campaign faces at least one defining moment when choices spell the difference between victory and defeat. Your first one has come earlier than just about anyone expected, and much depends on how you respond.
Up to now, you’ve pursued a steady-as-you-go, above-the-fray strategy, ignoring your Republican rivals and training your fire on President Obama. And for six months it worked well enough to keep you in the lead. Your campaign ignited little passion, but a majority of the party was willing to settle for you if no one better came along. And no one did: Many Tea Party favorites declined to enter the race, as did potential challengers for mainstream Republican support such as Mitch Daniels. And it was hard to regard the people in the race who excited the most grassroots enthusiasm–Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Herman Cain–as plausible Republican nominees. You were on track to grind out an uninspiring victory.
Then Rick Perry changed everything. Within two weeks he has established himself, not just as the Tea Party’s champion, but as a figure who could potentially unite all the party’s factions, including the business community that constitutes your base. Perry is a mortal threat to your candidacy. What should you do?
It will be tempting to keep on doing what you’ve been doing. After all, you’re comfortable with it, and you’ve gotten good at it. Some of your advisors will say that changing tactics now would give off an air of desperation. Others will say that your best course is to allow Perry–volatile, undisciplined, the distilled essence of Texas–to self-destruct. After all, he has already used the language of treason to denounce a third round of quantitative easing. Surely there are many more unguarded moments to come. So let’s let others help him take himself down, while we do as little as possible to antagonize people whose support we hope to get down the road.
Seductive, isn’t it? And dead wrong. Perry’s entrance into the race has highlighted your key weakness: People still don’t know who you are and what you stand for. They’re yearning for clear, strong, unapologetic leadership, but they don’t know where your red lines are. And efforts to placate opponents–such as fudging your long-held views on climate change–will only make matters worse.
But Perry’s emergence also gives you a unique opportunity to define yourself–against him. If you take it, you have a fighting chance of prevailing. If you duck it, you’ll lose, just as Tim Pawlenty did when he booted away his chance to take you on.
How should you do it? Well, to the extent that the Republican nominating contest is a rational process, it’s a search for a candidate with three characteristics. The nominee must be competent to serve as president, reliably conservative, and electable. You’re never going to be able to make your party believe that the longest-serving governor in Texas history isn’t fit to serve as chief executive. And despite some facts to the contrary, it won’t be any easier to challenge Perry’s conservative credentials. That narrows it down to one option: You must persuade the decisive portion of your party that Rick Perry is too extreme to be elected president.
Here’s your theme: Rick Perry wants to repeal the 20th century. I don’t. And neither do the American people.
That terrain of battle offers a target-rich environment. Where to begin? With Perry’s stated desire to repeal the 16th amendment? With his opposition to the 17th amendment, based on the odd view that taking the power to elect senators away from state legislators and giving it to the people of each state somehow amounts to a national power-grab? Maybe. But if I were you, I’d begin with Social Security. Here are Governor Perry’s considered views on the subject:

Certain [New Deal] programs massively altered the relationship between Americans and their government with regard to critical aspect[s] of their lives, violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles of federalism and limited government. By the far the best example of this is Social Security … . Social Security is something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now … . By any measure, Social Security is a failure. (Source: Rick Perry, Fed Up!, pp. 48, 50, 62))

So … Perry believes that Social Security is (a) unconstitutional, (b) an undemocratic imposition on an undefined “we,” and (c) a failure, however you look at it.
To be sure, there are real problems with Social Security, and lots of us have spent a good deal of time figuring out how to address them. In the long term, significant adjustments are necessary and unavoidable. But if you can’t figure out how to refute Perry, you don’t have the political intelligence to be an effective candidate. And if you’re not willing to say it, starting in September’s debates, you don’t have the guts to be an effective candidate. And you won’t be your party’s nominee.
Why should you pay any attention to me? After all, I’m a lifelong Democrat, even though my credentials have been questioned from time to time. Two reasons. First, I’ve been through six presidential campaigns, five of which went down to defeat in deeply instructive ways. When it comes to failure, I know what I’m talking about.
The second reason goes to my motives. Because I regard you as the most electable Republican with a serious chance of winning his party’s nomination, this memorandum might appear to be what the lawyers call an argument against interest. Why then would I give you what I sincerely regard as good advice? Answer: If the current mood of economic desperation persists for another year, which it might, then candidates who wouldn’t be electable in ordinary circumstances might capture that mood and ride it to victory. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a Perry presidency would be a catastrophe for the country. Not only does he have bizarre views on just about everything that has happened since the 1890s; if you think American politics is hyper-polarized now, just wait.
Bottom line: I’ll vote against you and do what I can to assist President Obama’s reelection effort. But I also want to take out an insurance policy: If Obama loses, I want the country to be in hands I regard as responsible–even if I’ll end up opposing most of what you propose.
In the end, what I think doesn’t matter that much. But I strongly suspect that millions of Americans feel the same way, even if you won’t be hearing from them in the next few months.

Matthew Yglesias takes a dour look at the focus of a debate now raging between liberal and moderate Democrats in his ThinkProgress post, “How The ‘Hack Gap’ Will Kill Obama’s Jobs Speech.”

I think Jon Chait gets this exactly right. The debate between moderate Democrats who want the president to propose initiatives that can pass Congress even if they don’t create jobs and liberal Democrats who want the president to propose initiatives that would create jobs even if they can’t pass Congress is nonsense.
If you’re going to propose things that can pass Congress and they create jobs, then I don’t think it matters whether or not they’re popular. The job creation will be rewarded. But if you’re going to pass something that can’t pass Congress, then it doesn’t matter at all whether it would hypothetically work, all that matters is that it polls well. And as Chait says, the things that Keynesian analysis suggests would create jobs — much larger budget deficits, higher inflation — are not popular things to campaign on…

As for the President’s upcoming speech on Thursday, Yglesias sees an unavoidable snare resulting from the lack of Democratic message discipline:

The smart move, if you’re just going to give a speech for speech’s sake, is to make the speech be full of nonsense bromides that voters like to hear. Except one problem President Obama will face is that for a “nonsense bromides” strategy to be maximally effective, it would be really useful for the entire progressive echo chamber to get really excited about his bromide agenda and start loudly insisting that the bromides would be super-successful in reducing unemployment if implemented. But Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow, etc. won’t do that. A speech full of bromides will be disparaged as bromidish. These are the wages of the “hack gap,” the fact that the progressive media ecology is less leadable than the Conintern. Consequently, the president will probably try to split the difference in a way that leaves everyone unhappy and sniping at him from all directions.

There is a better way to go, says Yglesias, “…What he actually needs are measures that would boost the economy and don’t require congressional authorization.” Yglesias doesn’t define the measures of such an ‘end run’ strategy in his post. But some of these measures will likely be advocated in a spate of “what the president should say” articles and posts over the next week.
Yglesias also identifies the primary obstacle to any further stimulus proposals:

But to understand just how screwed Obama is, you need to read Ed Glaeser’s criticisms of mass mortgage modifications. He goes on at great length about some flaws in the idea, and sort of breezily dismisses the need for economic stimulus in a couple of sentences that do nothing more than establish that this isn’t a particularly well-targeted form of stimulus. And yet is Glaeser volunteering to whip votes in the House to get a better-targeted, more-optimal stimulus through the GOP caucus? Of course not. But precisely the reaction you’ll get to any institutionally feasible stimulus at this point is that it’s a poorly targeted, inefficient desperation move. And in a sense, that’s true. The best time to get this right was back in 2009 when the White House had a much stronger hand.

Despite his impressive public speaking skills, President Obama faces a daunting challenge in his jobs speech a week from today. But if Yglesias is right, Obama’s greater challenge is to reduce unemployment through executive action that doesn’t require congressional approval.