You see that picture there? That's the bad ass motherfucker we elected, not the milquetoast pussy that gave the worthless Oval Office speech on Iraq last week. You see who's behind him there? Those are mostly white workers. If you saw them at a gathering of teabaggers, you wouldn't be surprised. It was as if President Obama let out his inner Barack, unencumbered by chimeric bipartisanship and briefly let loose by Rahm "Fucking" Emanuel. And Barack enjoyed coming out to play. We last had a play date with Barack sometime around June 30.
This was Obama's Labor Day speech, where he genuinely brought the old time noise, going after Republicans with a surprising streak of viciousness and anger. "Even on things we usually agree on, they say no. If I said the sky was blue, they say no," he mocked, to laughter in the large crowd "If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no." He said that the "special interests" in DC "talk about me like I'm a dog." And he proposed a near-certainly dead-on-arrival $50 billion infrastructure rebuilding plan and tax cuts for business investments in new equipment. If he's up to what the Rude Pundit think he might be, its failure could be the rallying point for Democrats (assuming Democrats understand this).
Remember (and sometimes the Rude Pundit has to remember this, too): Obama's game has always been rope-a-dope. Lull the opposition into a sense of security. Play turtle to their hare. And then rip off the shell at the last minute to sprint to the end. Call it the Scott Brown strategy, if you want. Republican Scott Brown wasn't any kind of vague threat to Democrat Martha Coakley in the Senate race in Massachusetts. It was a combination of Coakley's presumptive natural win with her lack of natural campaigning skills that pushed Brown up and over in the last two or three weeks of the race.
So the game could be that an eminently rational-sounding, lowball job-creating bill and Republican-desired tax cuts will fail due to Republicans in the Senate, and voters will have fresh on their minds an example of GOP intransigence. What can a Democrat run on then? That Senator Cocksucker would rather give tax cuts to rich people than give the unemployed jobs? That Representative Fucker voted against tax cuts that benefit small businesses? Sure, and if Barack keeps coming out to play, if President Obama can let Barack be team captain for a stick ball game, if Democrats understand that outnutzoiding Republicans ain't gonna happen (in fact, if Democrats start pointing out how nutzoid the Tea Party Republicans in many races are, as Harry Reid is doing in Nevada), then there's a chance to stanch the party's bleeding.
In its report this morning, NPR interviewed some guy who didn't like the speech. Obama promised bipartisanship, the man said. All he heard was more of the same old politics.
"And it's about time," the Rude Pundit wanted to tell the man.
